Pump up the Promise

The scholarship fund plainly needs more support

The Pittsburgh Promise college scholarship program is one of the city’s greatest assets, an investment in education, workforce development and social mobility that speaks volumes to individuals and companies looking to move here. While the Promise says the decision last week to reduce maximum scholarship amounts reflects an effort to distribute its money more equitably across the student population, the change also is a reminder of the need for businesses and other entities to boost financial support of the program.

The Promise reflects an aspirational Pittsburgh, the one trying to lure Amazon’s second headquarters and avert an estimated shortage of 80,000 workers by 2025. This is a time — this may be the best time — to ramp up support.

Founded in December 2006 by then-Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and city schools Superintendent Mark Roosevelt, the Promise owes its existence to a $100 million gift from UPMC. To leverage the entire sum, the Promise was supposed to raise $150 million in matching funds over 10 years. The Promise missed the goal — it’s still $50.4 million short — but UPMC provided all $100 million anyway. “It was not something that we considered foreign to our mission,” the Promise quoted UPMC’s CEO Jeffrey Romoff as saying about the gift. “Indeed, it was something we considered to be essential to our mission.”

According to the Allegheny Conference on Community Development study that predicted the looming shortage of 80,000 workers, “seven of the top 10 fastest growing occupations are in health care.” The other three — production/maintenance, data science and information technology — also relate to UPMC’s employment needs. UPMC’s gift was generous — no disputing that — but it was also enlightened self-interest for an entity that wants to keep growing.

UPMC, Amazon and other employers need a well-trained labor pool, which the Promise helps to provide by subsidizing students’ university and technical school educations. Employers also need the Promise’s scholarship incentives to address the long-term problems of attracting families to Pittsburgh and keeping young people here. They need the Promise, which ties scholarship to academic performance, to boost the academic profile of the Pittsburgh Public Schools so more workers with children will want to live here. They need the Promise, which reaches inner-city youths, to help produce more diverse, inclusive workplaces.

UPMC isn’t the only big entity supporting the program. The city’s foundations, long thoughtful champions of progress, were among the program’s earliest supporters. Highmark, BNY Mellon, PNC, American Eagle and Giant Eagle are among the businesses that have jumped on board. But given the connection between the Promise and the region’s talent pipeline, many more should be contributing.

In 2015, the Promise announced it was dropping the maximum annual scholarship to $7,500 per student, down from $10,000. This was to ensure the program’s long-term sustainability.

Last week, it announced more changes that executive director Saleem Ghubril says were driven by equitability, not sustainability. First, for students graduating high school in 2018 and thereafter, the maximum annual scholarship will drop to $5,000. The Promise also eliminated a policy that tied scholarship amounts to a student’s length of enrollment in city schools, and it returned to allowing scholarship money to be used for room, board and books in addition to tuition.

Mr. Ghubril said the changes will benefit lower-income students, who get other grants to cover tuition but need help with room and board, as well as other students attending lower-cost schools. He estimates that the average annual scholarship will increase to $4,200, up from $3,400, and that many will get the full $5,000.

Parents who banked on higher amounts — perhaps so their children could attend higher-cost schools — were understandably upset at the changes. The Promise must be careful to balance its obligations to middle-class and lower-income families. This is an element of equitability and essential to the mission of attracting families to Pittsburgh and retaining those already here.

Recognition of the program’s finite resources should galvanize Pittsburghers to work for a stronger, better funded Promise. Government and civic leaders should promote the program at every opportunity. Businesses that gave should encourage others to contribute, too. With the region’s economy at stake, donors should be lining up at Mr. Ghubril’s door.