Alaska defunds scholarships for thousands of university students ahead of fall semester – NBC News
After the University of Alaska lost 41 percent of its state funding, thousands of students were told Alaska would no longer be providing promised state scholarships.
Sian Gonzales found out he would no longer be receiving the almost $5,000 he has been awarded annually from the Alaska Performance Scholarship (APS) on July 9 — a month and a half shy of the first day of classes for his junior year at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
Gonzales, 21, didn’t lose the scholarship money because his grades slipped or because he violated any school rules; instead, Gonzales and 2,500 other students in Alaska lost the scholarship because the state is no longer funding it.
“I’m scared,” Gonzales, a nursing student, told NBC News. Raised in Juneau, Gonzales decided to stay in Alaska for college in large part because of the APS, and even worked toward earning the scholarship during high school.
“Alaska is in dire need of nurses. After I graduate, I want to use my skills to help my people here in Alaska. I want to stay in Alaska” Gonzales said. And that’s exactly what the APS was created to do.
The APS began awarding students money in 2012 to encourage bright high school seniors to stay in their home state for higher education and prevent a brain drain. The program has specific qualifications for students to be eligible, and some students, like Gonzales, spend their high school years taking certain classes, maintaining a high GPA, and studying to get good SAT or ACT scores in order to qualify. Gonzales is in Level 1, which means he gets $4,755 per year from the APS. The state also offered two other levels of the scholarship worth either $3,566 and $2,378 per year.