Rising Tuition Costs
With the rising cost of tuition all over the country, students are struggling to afford quality education, and a lack of support can be devastating to a student’s educational path. As tuition increases and students take on more and more debt, there’s also a startlingly high dropout rate. As many jobs of today require at least some college, this can highly impact someone’s ability to gain meaningful employment to pay off student debt. Marion County, Indiana has seen students face this specific problem and has derived a solution in the form of a series of support programs called Indy Achieves. This program is an initiative of Mayor Joe Hogsett of Indianapolis and is aimed at helping students prepare for the job market of today.
According to Indiana University, which is a proud collaborator of Indy Achieves :
If you’re a resident of Marion County in Indiana, you may qualify for Indy Achieves, a series of support programs geared to help you achieve a lifetime of success during and after your education at IUPUI.
The program is not merely a financial assistance program, it also includes mentoring, and success coaching. This is meant to help students enrolled in the program be successful overall in their journey to gain an education. It’s incredibly important that these students feel supported during and after their time in school. Students who are accepted to the Indy Achieves program will receive funding to help cover any tuition and fees still remaining after exhausting all other avenues of financial aid, as well as an allowance for books and supplies. This means if a student has exhausted all financial aid, they will be given dollars through Indy Achieves to cover the rest. Beyond just the financial aid being offered through the program, Indy Achieves also contains two other valuable components, mentorship and success coaching.
Mentorship is critical to a student or professional’s advancement, and through Indy Achieves, students will be connected to a community or business leader dedicated to helping them to navigate all the steps involved in being successful. Mentors can help students to fill out their financial aid forms, establish educational goals as well as be there for general guidance.
The Indy Achieves program will also connect a student with a success coach that will help a student align with all of their educational goals, as well as help them to prepare for the job market at large. Success coaches can help students make decisions on college majors and minors as well as to future career plans.
It’s incredibly important to see programs such as this one exist. They work to help students achieve their educational goals, close the funding gap, and actually prepare for the future. This is especially important in terms of securing a position in a confusing job market. Programs such as this can contribute to increased graduation rates and the students who do graduate are more likely to find careers in which they are fulfilled and contributive to the community at large. There is a number of programs like Indy Achieves available throughout the country that help students that are struggling to afford quality education and a number of resource directories that make it easy for you to find the funding and programs you need. GrantWatch is one of the resources and for someone who cares about the future of their education and they make funding easily accessible by listing grants for improving education at all levels.
Author: Lianne Hikind