Leveraging Scholarships to Advance Student Success

As college costs rise, students and their families continually look for ways to pay for an undergraduate education.Increased financial pressures have forced some students to work additional hours in part-time or even full-time employment.As a result, time to degree can be extended as students tackle fewer units per term or as they repeat courses, struggling to balance work and school.Scholarship funding is one mechanism to help support students, but providing financial relief is not enough.Scholarship recipients face many of the same challenges as all students, in that some find themselves struggling as they transition to college or shift from community college to a four-year institution.Some scholarship students find it difficult to ask for help, assuming that because they have been awarded merit scholarships, they should be able to manage all aspects of college on their own.In the face of these challenges, the College of Engineering at San Jos State University has developed a robust scholarship program.It moves beyond simply awarding money to help students pay their education costs by providing a broader student support program.Through student performance tracking, academic support resources, and professional development programming, along with program guidance and support from a range of faculty and staff members, scholarship students are retained at higher rates and earn their degrees in fewer semesters than the college average.This paper describes our integrated scholarship program involving multiple cohorts of students funded through a variety of financial streams including individual and corporate donors, and a National Science Foundation S-STEM grant.From the centralized scholarship application and selection process to the tracking and mentoring processes, we will show how institutionalizing the process has allowed us to attract additional donors, better support our scholarship students to graduation, and assist our students in moving into leadership positions.