SCiLL’s Scholarships Are Nothing New

At colleges across the country, departments compete for students with scholarships, fellowships, and grants. This practice is so common that it rarely attracts attention. Yet, a recent Daily Tar Heel article questioned whether donor-funded scholarships helped fuel enrollment at UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL).

Last month, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced that SCiLL will separate from the College of Arts and Sciences and become an independent school within the university. Created in 2023, the program was designed to promote civic education, civil discourse, and the study of American institutions.

Some critics at the DTH argue that SCiLL scholarships have inflated student participation and made the program appear more popular than it otherwise would be. However, this criticism overlooks a basic fact of higher education: scholarships are among the most common recruitment tactics used by academic departments to attract students. 

Like discounts in a retail store, scholarships are designed to attract customers. Universities offer scholarships to encourage students to enroll, and many academic departments provide their own awards to recruit students into specific programs. For students and their families, financial aid is often one of the biggest factors in deciding where to go to college, especially as tuition costs continue to rise.

SCiLL is far from the only program using scholarships to draw student interest. From the English Department’s Thomas Wolfe Scholarship to scholarships offered by Information Science, Nursing, and Journalism, UNC has long used financial aid to connect students with academic opportunities. SCiLL is doing what departments across UNC have been doing for years.

Additional departments across UNC’s campus show that SCiLL is not unique in offering scholarships. The Department of Art and Art History offers multiple scholarships for undergraduate students, while the Department of Dramatic Art awards a full cost-of-attendance scholarship to an incoming student each year. Students interested in mathematics, philosophy, psychology, public health, and education can all find scholarships offered through those departments.

SCiLL’s Libertas Scholarship gives selected students a $3,000 annual award and places them in a cohort centered on leadership, civic engagement, and the study of American institutions. It’s the kind of program that both supports students financially and connects them more closely to a specific academic community. 

Another program offered by SCiLL is the Civil Discourse Community. It’s residential learning and includes a retreat in the North Carolina mountains and a $3,000 Civ-Comm Fellowship for first-year residents. That may sound like a strong recruiting tool, and it is. But it is also a great opportunity for students to build community and explore their academic interests. Similar residential programs already exist at UNC, like First Gens, BLUE, and Transfers United. All are aimed at bringing students together and helping them succeed alongside their peers.

Behind many of the scholarships and programs is philanthropy: donors giving money to support causes they believe in. Philanthropy has been a defining feature of higher education since some of the earliest American universities were founded. Private giving allows universities to expand opportunities without relying solely on tuition or state funding. And ultimately, it’s the students who reap the reward, and that’s how it should be. Without philanthropy, many of the scholarships students rely on wouldn’t exist.

The DTH’s coverage of SCiLL treats donor-funded scholarships as something unusual, even potentially suspect. But at UNC and universities like it, that simply isn’t the case. Scholarships are used across campus in departments as a way to connect students with academic opportunities and to incentivize them to join. SCiLL isn’t operating outside the norm here.

If offering scholarships makes student interest less genuine, then many of UNC’s academic departments would have some explaining to do. In the end, students are the ones who decide whether a program is worth sticking with. A scholarship may get them in the door, but it can’t make them stay.

Reagan Allen is the North Carolina reporter for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.