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.