UW-Platteville Secures $2 Million In Scholarship Funds
According to a press release from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, their institution has received a highly-selective McNair Scholars Program Grant, that will provide more than $1.3 million over a five-year period.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program provides grants to institutions of higher education for projects designed to support diverse, first-generation, low-income students with effective preparation for doctoral studies.
Interim UW-Platteville Chancellor Dr. Tammy Evetovich has said their team’s hard work and diligence in securing the grant was a true testament of the value UW-Platteville places on making education available to more people. The McNair Scholars Program is a federal TRIO program funded at 151 institutions in the United States and Puerto Rico.
The Federal TRIO Programs are educational opportunity outreach programs designed to motivate and support students from disadvantaged backgrounds. TRIO includes six outreach and support programs targeted to serve and assist low-income, first-generation college students, and students with disabilities to progress through the academic pipeline from middle school to post-baccalaureate programs.
The McNair Scholars Program grants are awarded in five-year cycles; UW-Platteville will receive $261,888 annually for five years. The program will serve 25 undergraduate students each year. The types of projects funded through the McNair program focus on opportunities for research or other scholarly activities, seminars and educational activities to prepare students for doctoral studies, tutoring and academic counseling, faculty mentoring and more.
The McNair Scholars Program was established in 1989 and is named after Dr. Ronald E. McNair, physicist and astronaut who was killed in the Challenger Space Shuttle accident in 1986. McNair participants are either first-generation college students with financial need or are members of a group that is traditionally underrepresented in graduate education and have demonstrated strong academic potential. The goal of the McNair Scholars Program is to increase graduate degree awards for students from underrepresented segments of society. For more information, visit mcnairscholars.com.
In addition, UW-P officials recently announced a more-than-$1 million estate gift from late alumnus; Gerald Gunderson, who graduated from the college in 1965, and passed away in 2021. The estate gift will support nine scholarships that Gunderson had previously established. It is one of the largest estate gifts in UW-Platteville Foundation’s history.