FORT VALLEY, Ga. — An anonymous donor recently gave Fort Valley State University $250,000 that the school will put toward its Finish Line scholarship program. School leaders say this donation will be a big help to students.
Christopher Daniels is a senior accounting student at the HBCU and he says it’s exciting, but it comes with a lot of responsibilities.
“When you're a senior, you really have to think about what it is that you want to do. The next step, you're thinking about whether or not you want to go to graduate school, what career you want to embark on. You have a whole lot of decisions to make,” said Daniels.
That includes financial decisions. Daniels says the thought of paying back students loans stressed him out until he qualified from the Finish Line initiative.
“I was just very grateful and happy to receive this scholarship, and my parents? They were just happy that they didn't have to pay anything more out of pocket,” he said.
According to Fort Valley State’s VP for University Advancement and Director of Athletics, Anthony Holloman, the Finish Line initiative was established to help students get their degrees without accumulating excessive debt.
He says the scholarship wouldn’t have been possible without the anonymous donation.
“80+% of students attending FVSU receive some type of financial aid and typically those scholarship dollars do not help them get to the end. Now, the Finish Line Scholarship will add additional resources and will focus on helping juniors and seniors, as well as nontraditional students,” said Holloman.
He says the scholarship is geared toward helping students who have exhausted all their financial aid dollars and student loans. He hopes the scholarship will boost Fort Valley State’s graduation rate.
“What we've typically seen is that students come and they make it past the first year and they don't not graduate because of grades -- they don't graduate because of financial resources and we typically know that if you stay in school, you'll graduate,” said Holloman.
Daniels says it’ll allow him to focus on his work instead of money.
"I think that this is a great opportunity for seniors to focus on their school work instead of them having to worry about how they're going to pay back next semester, or the semester after that,” he said.
Holloman says the school is grateful for this donation, and that they hope to help between 50 and 100 students over the next two years. They hope to give eligible students $2,000 per semester, but that decision is not final yet.
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