Price tag rises for scholarships
May 30, 2006 - Posted in ScholarshipA new UF scholarship is expected to draw more minorities to Gainesville, but expanding the program in future years may prove costly, UF officials said Thursday.
The Florida Opportunity Scholarship, which was founded last year in an effort to increase the diversity of UF’s student body, was highlighted during a meeting of the Board of Trustees Committee on Educational Policy & Strategy.
The new scholarship is designed for incoming freshmen hailing from families that earn less than $40,000 per year. Students hoping to earn aid from the program must also be Florida residents and the first members of their families to attend a university.
About 400 students are currently eligible for the scholarship, Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin said, and the program’s first recipients will enroll at UF this summer.
But while UF President Bernie Machen announced plans to set aside $1 million for the program last August, university officials now expect the scholarship to cost about twice that amount.
Still, even as UF confronts the hefty price tag, Telles-Irvin praised the program as a means to foster more ethnic and social diversity on campus.
“The critical piece will be to continuously raise the funds for this program,” she said, adding that Gov. Jeb Bush supported a grant of $6.5 million to supplement the scholarship’s costs.
Although Machen predicted in December that the program’s price would balloon to nearly $7 million by its fourth year, committee members remained optimistic about its potential to attract a wider variety of students.
The Florida Opportunity Scholarship’s new female recipients outnumber males by about two to one, she said, and those students’ families earn an average of about $25,000 each year.
The meeting also laid the groundwork for bringing new programs to UF, including a bachelor of science degree in biology.