UIC offering free ride for top Illinois students
High-achieving students will be able to attend the University of Illinois at Chicago for free under a new program that aims to stop the flow of top Illinois students to other states.
The Chancellor’s Fellows Program will be funded with UIC’s share of a $25 million pot of money set aside by the state for merit scholarships at the state’s public universities starting in the 2019-20 school year.
All high school valedictorians, as well as any student with at least a 3.8 grade-point average and an SAT score of 1360 or an ACT score of 30 will be eligible. To be eligible, students must come from households with a maximum family income of less than $150,600 for a family of four.
The program will mean quite a savings for top students that attend the school. Base tuition and fees run $13,664 for in-state students. Room and board costs vary greatly but range from about $10,295 and up, according to the UIC student housing webpage.
Money for the “Aim High” program was added to the budget in August by state legislators in an effort to match the financial support given to prospective students from out-of-state universities.
Many university administrators and state legislators believe that more generous scholarship packages from out-of-state schools are in part to blame for the huge flow of students out of Illinois. More students leave here to go to college than any state other than New Jersey. Many public universities in Illinois have seen their enrollments crater over the past decade.
That’s not the case at UIC, which saw record enrollment last year. But the school still loses prospective students across the state border, Provost Susan Poser said.
“Schools are coming from all over the country and offering big scholarship packages to students from Chicago and Chicagoland, and I do think this is a good way to start to stem the tide a little bit,” Poser said. “It certainly was a missing piece of our financial aid program.”
The money was distributed based on enrollment at each of the state’s 12 university campuses. To get the money, schools need to match the state’s contribution dollar for dollar.