Federal Pell grants are financial awards provided to undergraduate students who demonstrate significant financial need. More than 57 percent of African American undergraduate students received a federal Pell grant in the 2015-16 academic year. For White students, 31.3 percent of all undergraduates received a Pell grant.
Esias Bedingar, a native French speaker, came to the University of Kentucky in 2014. He knew no English, but he went on to complete the English as a Second Language program in just one semester. He graduated in May 2018 with a bachelor’s degree in public health.
The program will provide $1,000,000 in financial aid debt relief over three years to current students or graduates of HBCUs and other four-year accredited universities.
The University of North Florida in Jacksonville has introduced the Holmes Scholarship program with the aim to increase the number of teachers from underrepresented groups who, in return for financial aid, commit to serving in the local public schools.
Robert F. Smith, a billionaire who is CEO of Vista Equity Partners, told the graduates of Morehouse College in Atlanta that he would commit up to $40 million dollars to eliminate the student debt of all 396 graduates of the Class of 2019.
The Meyerhoff Scholars program is recognized as one of the most effective models in the country to help inspire, recruit, and retain underrepresented students pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in STEM disciplines.
A survey conducted for LendEDU examines the percentages of college students who pay for all or some of their education. In what may come as a surprise to many readers, when the data was broken down by race, there are only small differences between Blacks and Whites.
Bianca Marlin is a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Columbia University in New York City and Elizabeth Ransey is postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Southern Company, one of the leading energy companies in the country, has made a gift to Mississippi State University that will help students from underrepresented groups pursue an engineering degree at the university’s James Worth Bagley College of Engineering.
ABC Ventures has announced its first product in the Educate Black America sportswear and accessories line, the “Educate Black America” cap.
The Black Philanthropy Circle will establish programs to improve the recruitment, retention and degree attainment for Black students, faculty and staff on all of Indiana University’s campuses.
Comedian Kevin Hart has established a new $600,000 scholarship fund in conjunction with the United Negro College Fund that will support the college education of 18 students from Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools who will be attending historically Black colleges and universities.
The Spaulding-Smith STEM Fellowship Program is named for Major Franklin Spaulding, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, and Elizabeth Hight Smith, who in 1905, was the first woman to earn a graduate degree at the university.
The study of nearly 1,500 young adults, led by a professor of social work at the University of Illinois, found that Black and Hispanic students who had accumulated student loan debt during their college years had, at age 30, $36,000 less in net worth than their peers who did not have student loan debt.
The federal government spends more than $30 billion each year on the Pell Grant program, which benefits well more than half of all Black students enrolled in undergraduate programs. But are colleges and universities doing a good job in graduating Pell Grant students?
Some 214 institutions have Pell graduation rates lower than 25 percent. Of the more than 60,000 Pell students initially enrolled at these institutions combined, only 9,904 of them (16 percent) graduated within six years.
A new study authored by Drew Allen of Princeton University and Gregory C. Wolniak of New York University found that a $1,000 tuition increase at 4-year, non-selective public institutions is associated with a 4.5 percent drop in campus diversity among full-time freshmen.
Many American families use the equity in their home to finance the higher education of their children or grandchildren. Since this source of wealth is less available to Black families, this places African Americans at a disadvantage in financing higher education.
QuestBridge, based in Palo Alto, California, connects high-achieving students from low-income families to 40 of the nation’s most selective colleges and universities.
On January 9, 1961, Hamilton E. Holmes and Charlayne Hunter-Gault became the first African-American students to register for classes at the University of Georgia. Now the 1961 Club, commemorating that event, has been established to raise funds from the more than 14,000 Black alumni of the university.
The University of Georgia School of Law has announced the establishment of the Benham Scholars Program aimed at increasing diversity at the law school. The new program is named after Robert Benham, the first African American justice on the Georgia Supreme Court.
Coach Darrell Walker uses his contacts in the sports, entertainment, and arts fields to secure donations of artwork and memorabilia that are auctioned off to raise money to pay for summer school tuition and other academic services for the players on this team.
Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has become a new partner with the Posse Foundation. A Posse of 10 students from the San Francisco Bay area will become Lehigh students next fall. The university hopes to add additional Posses of 10 students each year.
The New York Times recently published its list of the Top Colleges Doing the Most for the American Dream. The rankings are based on the percentage of undergraduate students who receive federal Pell Grants as well as the net price students must pay to attend these institutions.
A new report from the Center of Education and Workforce at Georgetown University finds that nearly 90,000 students who are eligible for federal Pell Grants for low income families, are qualified to be admitted to the nation’s selective colleges and universities but do not enroll in these institutions.
The Alumni Association of the University of Michigan recently announced a $30 million expansion of its Leadership, Excellence, Achievement and Diversity (LEAD) scholarship program. To be eligible for a LEAD scholarship, a student must have African-American, Latino or Native American heritage.
The Formation Scholar awards at Berklee College of Music, Howard University, Parsons School of Design, and Spelman College were established “to encourage and support young women who are unafraid to think outside the box and are bold, creative, conscious, and confident.”
Charlayne Hunter-Gault and her husband Ron Gault have created the Giving Voice to the Voiceless endowment at the University of Georgia. The endowment will provide grants to university students to promote social justice and global understanding.
The Broadening Ohio’s Workforce in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics-Agriculture scholarship offers a renewable $10,000 scholarship for first-year students and community college transfers. To be eligible, students must be Ohio residents and have had a minimum 3.0 grade point average in high school or community college.
Julian Bond, the noted civil rights leader, legislator, author, NAACP chair, and long-time faculty member at the University of Virginia who died in 2015, was the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Lowe’s Corporation has made a $500,000 contribution to the United Negro College Fund’s Emergency Student Aid program. The program offers financial aid to seniors at HBCUs who need funds in order to stay in school and complete their degree program.
The new scholarship at the medical school was made possible by a gift from Annie Marie Garraway, the sister of Dr. Levi Watkins Jr., the first Black graduate of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
Under the so-called Excelsior Scholarship plan, tuition at all two- and four-year college of the State University of New York System and the City University of New York System would be paid by the state for all full-time students from families whose income are below $125,000.
Robert F. Smith, founder and CEO of Vista Equity Partners and the only African American man on the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, has been identified by the Nigerian government as the Good Samaritan who is sponsoring the higher education of 24 women who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram.
In the fall of 2015, the National Merit Scholarship Program announced that it was ending its National Achievement Scholarship Program. Over the past 51 years, the program had awarded about $108 million to more than 34,000 college-bound African Americans. The replacement program will award funds to college graduates to pay off loans or for graduate study.
The American Talent Initiative, funded by the Bloomberg Philanthropies, hopes to expand to 270 educational institutions nationwide. It has set a goal of enrolling and graduating 50,000 students from low-income families by 2025.
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