Students and administrators are combining resources to forge a stronger lobbying effort to push state lawmakers just enough to reinstate the Michigan Promise Scholarship — a popular, merit-based program cut from the state budget on Oct. 30.

Their efforts advocating for an already-killed state program have a renewed sense of vigor of late, brought on by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s recent push to re-heat the debate over funding the scholarship.

Both students and University administrators have a stake in bringing the scholarship back. Without it, students stand to lose tuition funding that they and their families were counting on. For the University, which has pledged to fill the tuition void for students with demonstrated financial need, the program’s elimination carries a hefty price tag — one sure to further complicate an already delicate budget picture for the next fiscal year.

The Promise Scholarship awards Michigan college students up to $4,000 toward tuition over the course of four years, as determined by the student’s score on the Michigan Merit Exam, which is taken in high school. This year, 96,000 students would have been eligible for the awards at a cost of $112 million to the state — 6,172 of which attend the University’s campus in Ann Arbor.

COMBINING EFFORTS

In a series of speeches at colleges and universities across the state — including a stop at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti last week — Granholm called upon students to contact their legislators about the program.

About two dozen University students traveled to the event at EMU in a bus paid for by the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs.

Student groups like the Michigan Student Assembly’s Committee on External Relations and the LSA Student Government collaborated with the Office of Student Affairs on providing transportation, according to Jason Raymond, chair of MSA’s Committee on External Relations.

“We’ve been able to come to a mutually beneficial position where clearly the University and the students have a shared goal in terms of bringing the Promise Scholarship back, so it would be crazy for us not to combine our resources,” said Raymond, who also sits on the Division of Student Affairs Advisory Board.

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