https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/27/arkansas-single-parents-scholarship-helps-pay-living-expenses
This article is about a fund in Arkansas that helps single mothers who need support for going to school. Amanda Codon is a 27 year old mother with 3 kids. She is going back to school after she dropped out when she was 20, because she had 2 kids at the time. She also needs to work full-time in order to support her kids and go to school, and she barely has any time in the day to have free time, and she works really hard to support herself her kids, herself, and her tuition. She gets some financial aid but it doesn’t help.
However, she applies to the Arkansas Single Parent Scholarship Fund, and this fund is able to not only support her tuition, but it also supports the daily living of herself and her kids. This fund really helped out a lot, as Amanda didn’t need to work full-time to support herself. She is able to use this time in order to take care of her kids and also go to school, and study more. Hilary Clinton really supports this fund, and she’s planning to spread this charity out on a National Level. Arkansas is one of the only states that provides something like this, so spreading it out nationally would help single college mothers all over the country. Hilary’s campaign would be called SPARK (Student Parents in America Raising Kids). The money used to pay for it would come from her New College Compact.
I think this program is extremely helpful to single mothers, as they really need this type of support. This article gave me the ability to empathize with Amanda, and I fully understand why she needs this type of support. I support Hilary’s decision to spread this out to the world. Amanda needs her degree so that she can get a better job, and have a much easier time supporting herself and her kids. I hope that this change also leads to other types of change that need to take place, including teenage college students, and even senior citizen college students.
I enjoyed reading this article because I also think that it’s extremely important to help fund education for single mothers who want to go back to school to receive a college degree but have to work full time at the same time in order to support themselves as well as their families.The Arkansas Single Parent Scholarship Fund is incredibly helpful and important for situations like this. We talked in class how it’s a major problem that college systems still stubbornly follow the same rules that they have been following for the last several centuries, and that is focusing the system around younger students who are staying in college for four years. It’s just foolish for colleges to remain this way when an enormous amount of students are not in this “idea” situation at all; many need to support themselves or their families and need to work full time and they may not be able to be the full time student that they need to be in order to qualify for federal or state tuition assistance programs. It’s this foolishness that is severely hurting single mothers who wish to receive college degrees when they also need to support their families.
Another scholarship that does something similar to this but on a smaller scale is the Patsy Takemoto Mink Education Foundation, which offers financial assistance to low-income single women with children, who wish to pursue an education. Programs like this are extremely important and need to grow in order to help more people in these situations.