UA: Wider access has merit

FAYETTEVILLE — The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville did something in 2007 that’s becoming uncommon in public higher education.

UA created the Access Arkansas Scholarship, a program committed to raising money for need-based scholarship support.

Five years later, the state’s oldest and largest university has raised $5.4 million for Access Arkansas Scholarships that have benefited 55 students, said Danielle Strickland.

Access Arkansas is the only scholarship program on campus that signifies financial need as its primary standard, said Garrick Hildebrand, UA’s associate director for academic scholarships.

The awards vary from $500 to $2,000 for a semester or academic year, Hildebrand said.

Financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz said public universities and colleges have shifted their focus to rewarding students whose academic prowess outweighs their financial need.

These scholarships are referred to as merit-based in the financial aid field.

“In 1992-93, about twothirds of college grants were need-based,” said Kantrowitz, author of Secrets to Winning a Scholarship. “It had gone down [to about half of all grants] in 2008, the most recent year data has been available.”

“Increasingly, colleges have been abandoning needbased aid in favor of meritbased aid,” he said.

Students with average grades who may have not had the resources to succeed in high school are being squeezed out, Kantrowitz said.

There are several reasons for the shift in emphasis, Kantrowitz said.

One strategy has been to attract more students with strong academic back-grounds because they are more likely to stay in school and graduate, he said. They also see the recruitment of these students as a way to raise the institution’s academic profile, he said.

Most of these students probably have the means to pay for college, Kantrowitz. He calls the practice “buying students.”

John A. White, UA’s chancellor from 1997 to 2008, said he placed a high priority on merit-based scholarships after he arrived in Fayetteville, particularly for Chancellor’s Scholarships and Honors College Fellowships.

Chancellor’s scholars, who are chosen primarily for their academic achievements, receive up to $8,000 a year. To be eligible for an Honors College Fellowship, valued at $50,000 over four years, a high school senior has to score at least 32 on the ACT college entrance exam and have earned at least a 3.8 grade-point average.

White wanted to use these awards to keep the “best and brightest” students from leaving the state and also recruit “high-ability,” out-ofstate students, White said.

“Over time, it became clear to me that need-based scholarships required greater attention,” said White, who returned to teaching in 2008 and is a distinguished professor of engineering at UA.

“I had misjudged the extent to which need-based scholarships were required,” he said. “Our research indicated that scholarship support in the range from $2,000 to $4,000 would allow an academically qualified student to attend the University of Arkansas.”

In 2008, White and his wife, Mary Lib, donated $50,000 to endow an Access Arkansas Scholarship named for his parents. The John Austin and Ella Mae McDermott White Future Teachers’ Endowed Scholarship is available to students whose future plans involve teaching.

“My parents provided financial help for numerous young people to attend college,” White said. “Establishing an Access Arkansas Scholarship in their name was a ‘no brainer’ for Mary Lib and me. We hoped that our example would motivate many others to do something similar.”

In the 2010-11 term, more than 16,000 students at the university - 75 percent of the total enrollment - received scholarships, grants, loans or Federal Work Study assistance, according to the university.

A need-based scholarship comes to the aid of students who face a funding gap, which is the difference between the cost to attend the university and the money a student can secure from all sources, including family, scholarships, grants and loans.

UA calculated the average funding gap for each student in 2010-11 to be $3,780. For students who qualified for the Access Arkansas Scholarship, that number rose to $11,770, according to the school.

If they can’t afford to pay for college, students turn to student loans.

According to Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, which placed UA on its annual list of the “100 Best Values in Public Colleges,” the university’s students graduate with an average student debt load of about $21,500.

PRIVATE GIFTS

The largest donor to Access Arkansas has been the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation of Fayetteville, which gave $1 million in 2008.

For 2 1/2 months in 2009, the foundation matched gifts made to the scholarship program.

Debbie Walker, then the foundation’s executive director, sits on the university’s Board of Advisors, an organization that helps guide the institution’s advancement and fundraising efforts.

She heard UA officials cite the need for more needbased scholarship, which spurred the Walker foundation gift.

“The Walker foundation has always been very supportive of education,” Walker said. “You’re looking at these kids who are smart and they are ready to go to college, but the competition [for scholarships] is really huge. That was something that was very desperately needed and wanted by the university.”

A minimum gift of $50,000 is required to establish a named endowment.

Last month, the university announced a $100,000 gift from the children of James and Marguerite Pomfret.

The gift from sisters Margie Farber and Allison Thompson and their brother James Pomfret III created the James Edward Pomfret Jr. and Marguerite Humphreys Pomfret Access Arkansas Scholarship.

James E. Pomfret Jr., known as “Big Jim,” was vice president for business at the university from 1958 until his death in 1967. The dormitory Pomfret Hall is named for him. His wife, Marguerite, was the campus’ longtime assistant director of student aid until her retirement in 1990; she died in 1995.

Farber of Fayetteville, a 1966 UA graduate, said she and her siblings were interested in supporting students who come from modest means and may not have sparkling high school gradepoint averages or college entrance exam scores.

“We understood that the traditional way of doing scholarships has to do with the high-achiever and the 3.5 [GPA] and all those kinds of scores ... yet there is a group of young people who don’t get funneled into options that help them pay [for college],”Farber said. “It became clear that this was a niche that would really make a difference. Our mother’s career at the university alerted us to kids who had real financial obstacles.

“It’s easily one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.”

John Morris of Fayetteville funded five Access Arkansas Scholarships with a $250,000 donation in 2009.

Morris, a Farmington native and UA alumnus who taught history at Wharton Community College outside Houston for three decades, returned to Northwest Arkansas in 2000.

He said he believes that every student has the potential to be successful and, like the Pomfrets, wanted to giveto a scholarship program that would help students afford college.

His gift supports Access Arkansas Scholarships in the university’s J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Education and Health Professions, and the Sam M. Walton College of Business.

Morris said he initially intended to earmark his gift for UA’s largest merit-based scholarship program, the Chancellor’s Scholars Program.

Morris said the “best and the brightest” high school students should be rewarded with scholarship aid.

But “a lot of times the ‘B’ student or the ‘average’ student gets left out” of the scholarship pool, he said.

“They need an education, too,” he said.

PROGRAM THAT WORKS

The largest gift in the history of the University of Southern Mississippi created a scholarship program that takes financial need into account.

The Jackson, Miss.-based Luckyday Foundation announced in August 2001 that it was making an initial gift of $2.3 million that would fund 400 scholarships annually at the Hattiesburg school.

The gift currently provides $4,000 annual scholarships for Mississippi high school seniors who also demonstrate leadership skills, are exemplary students and are involved in their communities.

Larry Sparkman, director of the Luckyday Citizenship Scholars Program, said 75 percent of last year’s recipients also received federal Pell Grants, a program that helps students from low-income families go to college.

“At the University of Southern Mississippi, a significant portion of our students come in with [financial] need, so it’s not a hard program to fill,” Sparkman said.

Eighty-five percent of the scholarship winners have graduated, he said.

“I think we’ve proven that we can work with these students and help them graduate,” he said. “Our students are extremely grateful.” To contact this reporter:

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