Kent State Awarded $50,000 to Help Students to Graduate

By Alexandrea Rehner and Michael Mann

Kent State University has been selected as one of nine colleges to receive $50 thousand dollars from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.

The APLU has selected and awarded $450 thousand dollars to the schools in order for them to “launch or expand pilot ‘micro-grant’ programs meant to prevent low-income college students who are close to graduation from dropping out.” Micro-grants being the smaller grants that awards like these given by APLU are broken down into.

N.J. Akbar, Assistant Dean for Academic Diversity Success at Kent State, says that the $50 thousand dollars of the grant will fund the Kent Completion project.

The Kent Completion project aids low-income students nearing graduation to continue their education when a financial need is present.

Students that have applied for graduation, are within a year of their graduation date and have less than $1,200 of unpaid tuition are considered for the project. As long as students are deemed eligible for Pell grants by their most recent Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) results, the grant can be applied by the university.

“Before their schedules and classes are cancelled, they’ll have the Kent Completion Grant put on their account, then they will be notified that they have that funding,” Akbar said.

Once a student has been notified, it is required that they meet with an academic advisor soon after to make sure they have the proper schedule. This is done to ensure the student is scheduled correctly before withdrawal and drop dates for classes.

“Then [they can] meet potentially with one of us in the Academic Diversity Success staff just to make sure they have that extra layer of support,” Akbar said. “Our goal is to really make sure you’re on the path to success.”

The program also prevents additional income barriers to students that are part of the project. The project also gives a cap and gown to those who attend their required meetings with advising and the Academic Diversity Success staff.

The Kent Completion project is a reason for Kent State’s above average graduation rates, six percent higher than the United States’ average for all higher education. The most recent statistics from 2014 put Kent State at 55.1% to a U.S average of 49% (statistics from 2014 on collegfactual.com).

The awards distributed by the APLU comes after a research project they conducted called “Foiling the Drop-out Trap”. The project looked at the ten schools that had recently implemented programs and distributing micro-grants, observing their practices and results.

Shari Garmise, Vice President of the APLU Office of Urban Initiatives, says the money given to these nine schools including Kent State is a “one time project”. The project was funded with money given to APLU by Lumina Foundation and Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation.

APLU had to confirm the practices done by college and schools working in giving grants already, along with then hosting a workshop instructing schools how to apply them.

“Then they have us money to replicate [grants] in up to ten institutions and for a variety of reasons we could only allocate nine,” Garmise said. “

“We hope that once [the money] has reached the nine institutions that they’ll take it and run with it,” Garmise said. “We’re either getting them started or we’re growing small pilots.”

With all the preparations done, an applications were due in December for schools to submit to APLU for judgement.

“Each application was evaluated by four people,” Garmise said. “At least one member of each group was from an institution that had successfully implemented these programs.”

The process took until February to finalize and select the schools that would be allocated the award.

“I’d like to perhaps see this as a model for how we work to find more ways and a wider reach to help students.” Garmise said. “The way we scale and build out a model of good practices is really important to the sector.

Being able to spread the money across nine schools instead of just one allows for a much larger impact to the whole problem of students graduating.

“If you think about it, you only help substance of students in a single institution,” Garmise said. “That’s why it’s great to work with nine. When you work with nine, now we’re starting to talk about numbers. But if we can keep moving that dial to the sector, then we’re making real change.”

APLU requires that for this grant that at least 40-percent of the qualified students receive aid from the awarded funds.

When speaking on why the grant is important to students, Akbar says, “It could be a game changer” for anyone worrying about their final semesters and tuition.