One UNC scholarship that requires applicants to show proof that they are “worthy sons” and of “colonial ancestry,” is undergoing some changes after giving scholarship officials headaches.

The John Osgood and Elizabeth Amis Cameron Blanchard Scholarship Fund will change from a renewable scholarship to a one-time gift with smaller benefits.

The fund was established in 1958 with a donation of $100,000 to aid Episcopalians at UNC, said Dan Thornton, associate director of scholarship and student aid.

Because of the selective criteria - which excluded women and most minorities - Thornton said almost no one received the scholarship.

As a result the scholarship sat unnoticed until about 12 years ago, when officials in the Office of Scholarships and Student Aid realized that the scholarship fund had amassed a large chunk of interest.

Officials wanted to award the money, but the scholarship’s exclusive characteristics made it a difficult task.

Thornton said his office tried handing out the scholarship on the basis of need, but not many Episcopalians could demonstrate financial need.

Then officials tried taking a merit-based approach, requiring applicants to self-identify as Episcopalians and show their “colonial ancestry.”

“This is another kooky aspect of the scholarship,” Thornton said. “People really would send me huge binders full of genealogical information. I would look at it and say, ‘looks good to me,’” he said.

“To get hung up on people’s genealogy is not exactly what an administrator should really be doing.”

Thornton said his office tried to tone down the language and accept a broader range of students, dropping the all-male aspect of the award and loosening the “colonial” requirement.

He said he was able to do that thanks to a clause in every scholarship-donor agreement that allows for changes if the scholarship seems untenable.

To spend the acquired interest, the Blanchard scholarship was given out as a renewable scholarship of $6,000 per year to in-state students and $12,000 per year to out-of-state students for several years.

“We want to keep awarding in the spirit of the award, and we think that we’re doing that,” he said. “We’re just taking out some of the extraneous things.”

Junior Lindsay Eanes, a recipient of the in-state Blanchard Scholarship, said that she was lucky to stumble across a scholarship with such generous benefits, but that some of the wording about colonial ancestry did seem strange.

“We just crossed our fingers that you didn’t have to do that because we definitely do not have proof of colonial ancestry,” she said.

Now that the fund has spent most of the excess interest, the scholarship will no longer be given out as a renewable gift, only as a one-time award, Thornton said. Current recipients will be allowed to keep their scholarship through graduation.

Eanes said she was disappointed to learn that the scholarship would no longer be given out yearly, especially because she had told friends back home of its benefits.

“I know that some … were disappointed,” she said. “They came the next year because I had told them about this cool scholarship, and then they stopped handing it out.”

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This entry was posted by Taman Siswa on Tuesday, August 21, 2007 at 8:44 pm and is filed under Education News, Scholarship. Tags: Scholarship, Student, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.