A new program at Shoreline Community College will give 56 incoming students who live in Shoreline and Lake Forest Park a two-year, full-ride scholarship.
In the first program of its kind in this state, Shoreline Community College is offering 56 full-ride, two-year scholarships to high-school students in the class of 2015 who live in Shoreline or nearby Lake Forest Park.
Called Shoreline Scholars, the program is modeled after one in Oregon and aimed at students with a grade-point average of at least 3.5 and some level of financial need.
“We want to find the high-performing student who, for whatever reason financially, college is going to be out of reach,” said Shoreline President Cheryl Roberts.
Shoreline Scholars
The deadline to apply is April 29. For more information: www.shoreline.edu/shoreline-scholars/
Top students — the ones with near-perfect GPAs — are usually courted with merit scholarships and other awards, she said. And the lowest-income students often qualify for generous financial-aid packages, such as federal Pell grants or the state’s College Bound program.
Most Read Local Stories
Shoreline Scholars students don’t fall into either category but show a lot of promise. One of the program’s goals is to reduce the amount of loans students must take out.
The college is covering the cost through existing financial aid funds, help from its foundation and money from a private donor, Harley O’Neil, who is a foundation board member. The program is expected to cost about $400,000 over two years, and Shoreline hopes to be able to offer it every year.
It’s open to all students — even home-schooled and undocumented students who often miss out on aid.
Before she came to Washington, Roberts worked at the Oregon college — Chemeketa Community College in Salem — that Shoreline Scholars is modeled after.
“It was wildly successful there,” she said.
Although Shoreline is the first Washington community college to offer two years of tuition-free study to students in a targeted geographic area, the program bears some similarities to South Seattle College’s 13th Year Promise Scholarship.
That program pays for the first year of college at South Seattle for students who graduate from three Seattle high schools — Rainier Beach, Cleveland and Chief Sealth. At those schools, all students who graduate are eligible, regardless of family income or grade-point average.
Offering students the chance to attend community college without having to pay any tuition was an idea that grabbed headlines in January after President Obama proposed a federal program to do so across the nation. That idea is unlikely to get anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress, although it’s based on a popular program in Tennessee that was signed into law by that state’s Republican governor.
In Shoreline, Roberts said, about 200 students in the area’s two public high schools — Shorewood and Shorecrest — meet the eligibility requirements for Shoreline Scholars. In addition, there are two private schools in the area, and an unknown number of home-schooled students.
Applicants must have earned at least a cumulative 3.5 GPA by the end of the first semester of their senior year, and must take a placement test that shows they’re ready for college-level coursework.
Students can use the scholarship money to pursue a professional/technical program, or to take academic classes that will count toward a bachelor’s degree.
Many of Shoreline’s students start at the college with the aim of transferring and getting a bachelor’s degree; in 2013, for example, 44 percent of Shoreline’s 10,000 students planned to transfer to a four-year school.