Retired faculty, staff provide sophomore scholarships
With the cost of schooling constantly rising, students, parents and colleges are always looking for ways to make this financial burden easier to carry.
An organization called EAREA, or Emeriti and Retired Employees Association, at Utah State University, has created a scholarship in hopes of contributing to the ongoing effort to support USU students.
“It’s a group of retired faculty and staff from Utah State who have a commitment to staying and supporting the university,” wrote Mary Leavitt, the scholarship chair at EAREA, in an email. “Once we’re in retirement, we have two missions. One is a social mission so that we stay in contact and don’t lose each other once we retire. The other is the scholarship that we support.”
EAREA was created in 1978 when theater department faculty member LeRoy Brandt noticed most of his first-year students would not return next fall due to financial stress. Brandt wanted a way to help sophomore students pay for their schooling, so he created the EAREA scholarship endowment: a scholarship open only to sophomores, funded by retired faculty.
“There’s hardly anything for sophomores,” Leavitt wrote. “You can get a lot of money coming in as freshmen, juniors, and seniors. You’ll often have money available to you because you’re in your major. But that sophomore area just kind of gets overlooked.”
The scholarship endowment currently sponsors two $7,000 scholarships ($3,500 per semester). The EAREA stops taking applications the first week in May and announces the winner in early June. The application requires an essay, GPA and current financial situation of all applicants.
“The Scholarship Committee, which is a subset of board mates, meets usually two or three times each cycle independently and then comes together and combines their scores,” wrote Tom Lee, EAREA’s president, in an email. “So everybody’s got kind of a rubric or a matrix that they’re using to score all the applications that meet the qualifications.”
Lee said the committee searches for and selects the students who “have the most need.”
“If there were five students with the same GPA, and we all said their essays were great, but two of them already had other scholarships or grants, we would wait and look for the financial need of students that hadn’t gotten other things,” Lee wrote.
Last year, the EAREA only received 40 applicants on Scholarship Universe. Scholarship Universe is USU’s scholarship portal, letting students easily access and see what scholarships they qualify for. However, Leavitt shared her concern about student’s lack of knowledge of this resource.
“I had a student last year who got the scholarship, and she told me that her friends didn’t even know what Scholarship Universe was and that they had never even heard of it,” Leavitt wrote.
Leavitt also said most applicants found out about the scholarship via their school’s emails.
Lee and Leavitt both want to see EAREA grow to welcome more members and support more scholarships for sophomores in the upcoming years.
“I would just like more retired employees to know about EAREA and participate,” Lee said.
“I would like to see the organization grow,” Leavitt said. “I think that it’s a valuable tool to keep us connected to the university. When you retire, you’re kind of just suddenly not there. And so this is a way to keep that momentum going and keep your connection there. I’d also really like to see the scholarship be able to grow, it would be nice to be able to fund the whole year and give it to more than two students.”