Ember Woodmansee lives within walking distance of Tulsa County lines, but an Osage County ZIP code made students like her ineligible for massive scholarships at Tulsa Community College — until this fall.
Since 2007, the college’s Tulsa Achieves scholarship has paid up to 100% of tuition and mandatory fees for thousands of Tulsa County high school graduates. This year, the college launched a parallel “Advantage” scholarship for students like Woodmansee, giving nearly $500,000 to students who live in neighboring counties.
“If you have this scholarship based on just where you live and has very little requirements, but you don’t have one for the surrounding people … that’s really unfair to the kids that need the help,” Woodmansee said. “They’re just stuck.”
Woodmansee was one of the first to receive the new scholarship, which covers one academic year of tuition and mandatory fees for graduates of Broken Arrow, Charles Page, Jenks and Sapulpa high schools. She’ll now only pay $53 for her first year while she works full time at Starbucks in Sapulpa to save for the rest of her degree. She hopes to become a physical therapist assistant.
“It was really nice having two semesters secured because it was a piece of mind,” Woodmansee said. “Now I can start planning for my future and not feel like I’m having to pay a majority of my paycheck just for college.”
The new scholarship is smaller than the Achieves program, which covers three years and gave more than $2.1 million to 3,607 students this semester alone. But unlike its predecessor, the Advantage scholarship is accessible to students who took a gap year.
“We really wanted this to be an access scholarship, and since it’s new, we were able to create and develop and tailor it to really meet student needs,” said Eunice Tarver, vice president of student success and chief student affairs officer at TCC.
But a slow rollout in the spring hindered communication about the program, Tarver says, causing confusion for students like Woodmansee, who says TCC financial aid advisers weren’t aware of it when she applied. It took several months for her to get the scholarship finalized and approved due to limited awareness at the college.
“While we did our best to make sure that as we rolled out the scholarship we were educating, not just externally, but internally, you could never communicate too much,” Tarver said. “That’s one of the lessons learned, it takes a little bit to permeate.”
The college plans to continue offering the scholarship next year — with even more students expected to take advantage. More information on the program can be found here.
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