Eighty-three percent of this year’s admitted students said financial aid or cost played a significant role in their decision to enroll. State cuts have reduced need-based aid by roughly $1 million, widening the gap between what many students are offered and what it costs them to enroll. For a first-generation student whose family has no roadmap for paying for college, that gap does not send them to a different school. It sends them out of higher education altogether.
Your gift will build the merit scholarship endowment, the university’s single largest lever for keeping talented students enrolled through graduation. Every $10 million endowed generates roughly $500,000 a year, and awards renew for three years at a 91 percent renewal rate. Alongside the endowment, this priority funds the paid internships, study away opportunities, and first-generationstudent services that carry a student from their first semester to their first job.
It removes the reason a talented student would enroll somewhere else, and it tells them that people who have never met them have already invested in what they might become. A paid internship does the rest. It gives them the experience employers screen for and invests in them while they earn it, so a student supporting a family never has to choose between the resume line and the paycheck. Talent, not income, will determine who enrolls at Worcester State and who walks across the stage to graduate. Your gift will make all the difference in that journey.
