by Kyle Massey –
Arkansas Tech University senior Mandy Hughes grew up knowing the burden of her mother’s student debt, so she made sure that when she graduates next month, she won’t have any.
She and thousands of other young Arkansans have seized on new and innovative programs that help them navigate college without piling up debt.
“I was raised by a single mom who went to school to go into the medical field, and she is still paying off her student debt,” Hughes said in a telephone interview. “She helped me realize early on that the No. 1 thing was for me to get through school on scholarships.
“Being able to do that, having the money that was granted to me, has helped me be able to partake in more events at Arkansas Tech instead of having to work an insane amount of hours,” said Hughes, a Bentonville High School graduate. Her mom, Kimberly Coleman, is a medical billing coding specialist at a physical therapy clinic.
Hughes and classmate Cogan Hester, a business management major set to graduate in December, got help from Tech’s financial aid planners to stack their Pell Grants, Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarships and institutional scholarships to go to college “Beyond Free.”
That’s the name of the marketing campaign that ATU President Russell Jones, a trained accountant and former dean of business, is hoping to promote forcefully in coming years.
“We’ve got to do a better job of getting the word out,” said Jones, who became the university’s president last July.
“It’s good news for undergraduate students,” Jones said. “If the student is Pell-eligible, and if that student has a Lottery Scholarship [officially the Arkansas Academic Challenge], the average yearly tuition and fees for that category of student here is $84 a year.”
About 1,120 of Tech’s 6,000 undergraduates meet those criteria.
Education, and Money Back
“On top of that,” Jones continued, “those 1,120 students averaged, after all their scholarships, a refund of $3,500 a person. We credited $7 million back to students last year above tuition and fees, and that $7 million was used to pay room and board and books and other expenses.”
How does that work out, financially, for the university?
“It costs us between $7,000 and $8,000 [per year] to educate a student, but you have to remember we’re refunding scholarship money that came from the federal government [through the Pell system] and the lottery money from the state,” Jones said. “It’s not like we’re refunding $7 million of our money. We take out what it costs us to educate them, and we refund the rest.”
The approach appealed to Hester, the son of Fort Smith-area real estate agent Amanda Hester. He got his own real estate license right out of Hackett High School, where he compiled a 4.0 grade-point average. He hopes to return to real estate next year and eventually own a fitness gym.
Determined to start in business without any student debt, Hester found that Arkansas Tech was the perfect place to do just that, he said.
“The school is actually now paying me,” Hester said. After two years of “paying a little bit out of pocket” to live on campus, “now that I’m living off campus, the money is now coming back to me to use for rent,” Hester said. “I’m getting paid as a refund. It’s been extremely positive. Russellville is great, and scholarships are a big part of why I came here. They give you a lot of money at Arkansas Tech, and it’s not super expensive to go here.”
Full tuition and fees run about $9,800 per year, but almost all Tech students get a steep discount.
Pell Grants, Lottery Money
The average Pell Grant nationally was $4,491 as of November, according to Melanie Hanson of the Education Data Initiative, which found that 34% of American undergraduates receive Pell money. The grant maximum is $6,895. The Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship awards $1,000 to freshmen at four-year colleges, $4,000 a year to sophomores and juniors, and $5,000 to seniors. Students at two-year schools get $1,000 as freshmen and $3,000 the next year.
Scholarship money allows many Arkansas colleges and universities to offer programs similar to Tech’s, though they may “stack” the scholarships somewhat differently. The University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Arkansas State University and the University of Central Arkansas are prime examples.
UA Little Rock’s Jonathan Coleman described his school’s no-debt program, “the Trojan Way,” but first, he backed up a few years.
“In the pandemic, it got really obvious that students were no longer choosing their college based on an academic program, which was the way it had been for years, for decades,” said Coleman, who has two positions: director of financial aid and scholarships and interim vice chancellor for enrollment management.
“It became quite obvious that affordability was now top of mind; students and their families were more worried about finding a college they could afford to go to, more than ever before. We felt that was a really good opportunity to push affordability and cost as kind of our niche.”
UA Little Rock launched a scholarship in the fall of 2021 that covered half of tuition and fees, about $5,000 per year. “There’s no income requirement,” Coleman said. “Regardless of how much money a family makes, they’re eligible for it, and there’s no academic requirement for an incoming student to receive it, as long as they’re eligible to be admitted and are full-time students.”
Offering More
The program worked so well over a couple of years that the university wanted to offer more.
“We still had students that needed help,” Coleman said. “They were receiving a Pell Grant, they were receiving half off, and they were receiving Academic Challenge from the state, but they still owed for tuition and fees. We felt that it was our responsibility to take that extra step.”
So in the fall of 2023 the university announced its Trojan Guarantee Scholarship, which covers the final tuition and fee deficit. “So that started last fall with our first cohort of Trojan Guarantee recipients. Over the course of our Trojan Way affordability program, we’ve awarded funds to nearly 2,000 students, and it equals almost $6 million.”
The program has bolstered enrollment, Coleman believes. UA Little Rock now has about 5,400 undergraduate students.
“Over the past three years, we’ve increased our freshman class by at least 60%,” he said. “For fall of 2024 our freshman class was up 29% compared to the fall of 2023, and we do believe that a significant part of that increase is because of our affordability measures.”
The next step is to educate students about tutoring opportunities, health services, and mental health services and counseling, Coleman said, noting the two R’s of enrollment growth: recruiting students and retaining them.
The good news for the university’s bottom line is that community donors have largely paid the freight. An anonymous $15 million donation in 2021 went directly to pay for scholarships. “That was the main funder of these programs,” Coleman said.
UCA Commitment
A big gift also helped launch an affordability initiative at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. In September 2023, university President Houston Davis announced UCA Commitment, a program fueled by a $10 million gift from the Windgate Foundation of Little Rock.
“They knew we were about a year away from launching the program and asked if we could launch sooner with their support,” Davis said. He called the Windgate donation “the wind in our sails that allowed us to jump-start the program in the fall of 2024.”
It covers tuition and fees beyond Pell Grants and Lottery Scholarships “with a mix of scholarships and work-study assignments that can give them a pathway to complete their degree debt-free for all four years,” Davis said. Students from families earning up to $100,000 a year are eligible.
“First and foremost, the funding for UCA Commitment is coming from our own budget,” Davis said. “We are, and have been, planning for a national and state phenomenon of declining student enrollment. We are making careful choices about the budget we have.”
Arkansas State in Jonesboro offers the Arkansas Promise Plus scholarship to students whose families’ adjusted gross income is under $70,000.
Students start by completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, then complete the application for Arkansas Lottery Scholarship money. “The Arkansas Promise Plus serves as a last-dollar scholarship, so whatever the balance is after the Pell Grant money and Lottery Scholarship is applied, this scholarship kicks in and covers it,” said Todd Clark, A-State’s chief marketing and communications officer.
Last fall it covered eligible students’ tuition and fees, and next fall it will also cover housing.
A-State is Arkansas’ second-largest college with a record fall 2024 enrollment of 16,687, up 12% from the previous fall. It trails only the University of Arkansas in size.
Clark said scholarships are about removing barriers to education and lifelong success. “College graduates are 25% more likely to be employed than high school graduates,” he said. “They earn over $2 million more over their lifetimes. And if a first-generation college student gets a degree, it not only changes the trajectory of their lives, but also their family’s lives and their kids’ lives.”
Hughes, the Arkansas Tech senior, said applying for scholarships and learning how to budget were essential to her college success, which is launching her into a career as a training director for Chick-fil-A.
“As a finance major, I’ve always been numbers-oriented,” she said. “When you know you’re going to go to college, start saving at least a little bit, and then start applying for scholarships as soon as you can. The cost is going to end up being a little more than what you expected.”
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by Mark Friedman –
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