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Susu Johnson speaks to a group of high school seniors after she and her husband, George, announced they had committed $40 million to make Meeting Street scholarships available to students in Spartanburg County.
Susu Johnson speaks to a group of high school seniors after she and her husband, George, announced they had committed $40 million to make Meeting Street scholarships available to students in Spartanburg County.
When the Meeting Street Scholarship Fund launched in 2020, it showed great promise not only to inspire Charleston County public school students to excel but also, and potentially more importantly, to inspire other philanthropists as well as our state government to support those efforts.
Four years after Ben Navarro and his wife, Kelly, pledged to provide $10,000-per-year scholarships for all Charleston County students who receive a federal Pell Grant and S.C. LIFE or Palmetto Fellows scholarship and attend one of 17 high-graduation colleges, we continue to see progress toward all three goals.
Last week, the Navarros’ philanthropic organization Beemok Education announced that philanthropists Susu and George Dean Johnson would fund Meeting Street scholarships for Spartanburg County students. This follows a 2021 announcement that Darla Moore would fund them in eight Pee Dee counties, a 2022 commitment by anonymous donors to expand the program to Barnwell County and last year’s announcement that Dave Proctor would pay for scholarships for Jasper County students.
More significantly, the Legislature has increased funding for state colleges so they could stop increasing tuition for in-state students, and Gov. Henry McMaster has worked with lawmakers to dramatically increase need-based scholarships to ensure that all students who receive Pell Grants can attend in-state public colleges tuition-free.
All that helps encourage students who thought college was out of reach and so didn’t see the reason to work hard in high school.
But tuition-free isn’t the same as free, because there are a lot of costs beyond tuition, such as housing, food and books.
As The Post and Courier’s Anna B. Mitchell and Valerie Nava report, Beemok Education’s Josh Bell told a group gathered in Spartanburg for the Johnsons’ announcement that after all forms of state, federal, private and institutional aid are added up, most students still face about $12,000 a year in those other costs that they have to pay out of pocket.
Such a funding gap, he said, might just as well be “a million dollars” to low-income students.
That’s why it was such good news when first Clemson University and then, earlier this month, the College of Charleston announced they would cover any of those non-tuition costs that remain even after the Meeting Street scholarships.
The downside to the Meeting Street scholarships, and the extra support from Clemson and the College of Charleston, is that as valuable as they are to the students who receive them — a total of 952 so far — most students don’t receive them. That’s because most students don’t live in one of the 13 counties where the program is available or their family makes more than the Pell Grant limit of about $60,000 a year.
To make this more meaningful, we still need three more things: We need more private donors, to expand the program to the state’s 33 other counties. We need more colleges to step up to the plate. And we need the Legislature to do more.
The University of South Carolina started that second process a year ago, when it announced it would provide free tuition and academic fees to all S.C. students — not just Meeting Street scholars — who graduate in the top 10% of their class with a family income of less than $80,000; that adds a lot of students who don’t qualify for Pell Grants, or state aid. (That followed an earlier announcement that USC would automatically admit all S.C. students in the top 10% of their graduating class to the main campus and in the top 20% to other USC campuses.)
Coastal Carolina and Francis Marion universities quickly announced they also would match the free tuition and fees commitment. And some technical colleges, including Trident Tech, are offering free tuition to all students, regardless of income.
Most colleges, however, aren’t providing this sort of extra assistance, and the Legislature so far hasn’t been willing to help more than the very poorest students.
Neither our state nor our nation needs to ensure that students can attend any private college or out-of-state public college they want, no matter how expensive it is, no matter how many advanced degrees they want to pursue, and no matter how useless some of those degrees might be.
Our state, however, needs to ensure that students who do well in school can afford to attend a state college that meets their needs — whether that’s a technical college, a community college or a university. We’re moving in that direction, but we still have a good way to go.
Yes, helping individual students do that helps those individuals, but it also helps our state, by reducing the number of South Carolinians who end up in dead-end jobs or worse, by increasing the number of people who become productive citizens and even by helping attract more high-paying jobs to our state. That’s something we all need to see happen.
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