GREENSBORO – Some 80 percent of students at UNC Greensboro work either full- or part-time.
“I like to call us an ‘Earn It’ school,” UNCG Chancellor Frank Gilliam declares in the accompanying video.
“They’re not here on their family’s money. They work, and work hard – some of them two and three jobs. Some 40 hours a week and still come to school – it’s hard to imagine,” Gilliam says. “They’re willing to work for it, and there’s not a sense of entitlement.”
The biggest challenges for these students, he says, are financial. And UNCG tries to find the best ways to supply need-based aid to students. The first priority of a capital campaign scheduled to begin next year will be scholarships, he says.
“We’re very concerned about family debt,” Gilliam says. “A thousand dollars makes a difference to a student.”
An $800 car repair can keep a student from paying tuition, so UNCG is developing “last-resort” funds to help students who face emergency or unplanned expenses.
“Our job is to, the best we can, find resources to support qualified students and make it so that they can finish their degree in a timely way – and do it with the least amount of debt possible,” Gilliam says.
UNCG considers itself the most diverse school in the UNC System, whether considered by race, ethnicity, class, geography or first-generation students. The emphasis on financial aid fits with a “demographically balanced” student body, Gilliam says.
“We take that wide array of students farther,” he says, noting that U.S.News & World Report recently ranked UNCG No. 1 in North Carolina for social mobility.1
“That’s why I came here.”
1http://learnmore.uncg.edu/blog/uncg-ranked-1-in-north-carolina-for-social-mobility-by-us-news-world-report; https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/social-mobility.
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