Putting Scholarships on the Radar for Non-Traditional Students
By Cynda Alexander. 1. What are the biggest challenges adult students face when it comes to finding available scholarships?
The biggest challenge is knowing that scholarships exist for them. The first scholarship workshop I held in January 2013 for non-traditional students opened my eyes to what the general student population thought of when it came to scholarships. They thought they wouldn’t be eligible because they were non-traditional. … At [the University of Arkansas], we define non-traditional students a little differently than most higher education institutions. … We have no age minimum — you don’t have to be 25 and up. When I started this position three years ago, I wrote a very extensive proposal on how to serve our non-traditional students. We changed the definition of the non-traditional student [to include]: if you delayed enrolment after high school, you work part-time, you work full-time, you’re financially independent from your parents, you’re in the military, you’re first-generation, you’re already a parent. That makes them non-traditional. They don’t live in our residence halls. We are a metropolitan university; we only have 1,400 beds on campus but we have 12,000 students, so most of our student population is non-traditional given our definition of it. More...