It’s official. The Nebraska Promise program – which provides undergraduate tuition for qualifying students whose families have an income of $60,000 or less – is here.

It will be available to students who are just starting out as well as students who are already enrolled. This will add 1,000 scholarships to help students access higher education. My only qualm is that I wish we could provide more.

As it stands, there are around 50,000 plus students who attend the University of Nebraska. About 3,000 of those are receiving financial aid through a variety of grants. The money that is being used to fund The Nebraska Promise is separate from that and comes directly from our current budget.

I’ve seen quite a bit of misinformation lately about university finances. I get it. University budgets can be complicated and unwieldy, which is why I’d like to take this opportunity to set the record straight.

The Nebraska University Foundation has money contributed by donors for specific purposes. It looks like a giant lump but funds can only be spent on what the donor specified – such as various programs or buildings – when it was donated. It is not money the university can access at will. Nebraska University Foundation is a separate organization with its own budget and it is responsible for processing and overseeing donors’ gifts.

The money for The Nebraska Promise program is coming out of the current budget.

This is not money coming in from philanthropic sources, it’s not coming from state taxpayers, it’s what we are scraping together from within our current budget because we, as a university and as a community, could not sit idly by while families and students struggled during this pandemic.

Few individuals build their financial plans around a global pandemic. Most people in this country struggle to make ends meet, much less save, in the best of times. And now people are losing their jobs through absolutely no fault of their own at tremendous rates, which puts survival – and the future, including education – in question.

It is a harsh reality that lower and middle income families are hurting the most during this crisis. Middle and low income families hurt the most even when the economy is performing well.

We need to be thinking about what our students and their families are facing, and to make education affordable and accessible for everyone.

We need to come together to support each other, to continue to invest in our children, our future, our bright and industrious students. It’s important to give our students hope, to let them know that there’s support for them at the University of Nebraska to help them attend, help them stay, help them finish their degrees.

We need students to know that we care about them, that we know they’re facing tough times but that we don’t want this pandemic to stall their educational future. We aren’t going to abandon them because they don’t exist in a certain tax bracket.  

When our students – all of our students – are given the support they need to succeed, they become the doctors, the teachers, the artists, the farmers and the engineers that develop and enrich our communities for generations.

Our mission is to educate across the state of Nebraska.

The systems we have in place may be complex but our mission is not. Neither is the decision to do what we can, when we can, to help struggling students and their families. It’s what we do when times are tough that define our character.

It gives me hope and pride to say, “we are there for you.” That is our character. That is the definition of community.

*Barbara’s thoughts as written by Kate based on weekly (fascinating) conversations.

It’s hard to talk about anything but the pandemic lately.

When I started writing this blog I was out of the country on a vacation that we had planned two years in advance, watching the pandemic unfold from afar. It may sound weird, but initially I was grateful to be relatively removed from the situation. I even thought it might even be over by the time we returned.  

Sadly, the numbers have climbed every day we have been gone, every day we’ve been back, and they’re spreading worldwide.

The world is changing so fast, and the changes that are to come – the ones we haven’t yet anticipated – loom large in my anxious mind. My feelings today are an echo of previous different pain-inducing events: my fourth grade teacher developing polio; the Cuban Missile Crisis; JFK’s assassination; 9/11, and so on. All of these events disrupted us in different ways on different scales and with different fears.  

We recovered from these but for many of us it changed things. Some of those changes were immediately apparent, others took time to reveal themselves. The uncertainty of what the next day would bring made us uneasy.  

So, as I read of schools closing, conferences cancelling, sports events like March Madness shutting down due to covid-19, I realize this could be a much different outcome. But we have to be intentional about it.

I’ve been imagining the time to come and – however long this continues – thinking about the whole world taking a time out.  This gave me some modicum of comfort. What if we all stepped back and took time to assess? I mean, really dig deep?

Perhaps, amidst the uncertainty and the very serious situation the world is in, this comes with the opportunity to recognize what is important to us.  

There are so many possibilities. We could begin to turn away from the ugly public rhetoric, nasty bullying on social media—the things that cause so much separation. This pandemic is calling us to take care of ourselves, our loved ones, and those around us.  

We could build a true sense of community in our neighborhoods, in the cities, and in the world. We are all connected. Sadly, it takes a pandemic for us to understand that. What if we all took this time to care about one another again? 

There’s one thing that’s certain: we could use less of “what’s in it for me” and more of “how can I help.” Maybe while the world is in this cosmic timeout, we have a chance to change.

*Barbara’s thoughts as written by Kate based on weekly (fascinating) conversations.