UW-Madison Pell Pathway program lifts big financial burdens

Zheng’s mother, Qing, owns a Chinese take-out restaurant in Greenfield, south of Milwaukee. As a single mother, she’s adamant that Enson and his younger brother, Evan, focus on their education. As the daughter of immigrants, Qing couldn’t go to college and instead opened the restaurant.

Enson had been hoping to qualify for Bucky’s Tuition Promise, a program that helps pay for any remaining tuition balance after scholarships and grants. He was unaware that Bucky’s Pell Pathway, an expansion of the program that covers other school-related costs such as housing and food, was launching this fall.

With Bucky’s Pell Pathway, that weight on the pre-med major’s family was lifted.

“My mom likes to say that ‘Don’t worry about college, I’ll pay for it. Don’t worry about the money.’ But I’ve always known that would mean that she would give me all her money, and I didn’t want that,” Zheng said. “I want to sustain myself in college and my mom still has money to sustain herself. So, I found out (about the Pell Pathway program) shortly after I got accepted (into UW-Madison) and I got the email, and I was ecstatic.”

An increasing number of first-year UW-Madison students are qualifying for two of UW-Madison’s tuition promise programs, with Pell Pathway intended to tackle the ever-growing cost of attending the state’s largest university.

The goal of the programs is to help alleviate the disadvantages students from low-income families frequently face. The assistance is only available to in-state students, and no state funds are used for either the Pell Pathway or the Tuition Promise program.

Just less than 12% of students qualify for either Bucky’s Tuition Promise or Bucky’s Pell Pathway. Of this year’s freshman in-state students and transfer students, about a quarter of them qualify for either of the programs.

Bucky’s Tuition Promise was started in 2018 by then-Chancellor Rebecca Blank and was made available to families making less than the state’s median income, then $56,000 annually. That income threshold has since increased to $65,000 for this fall.

“A quarter of our students are coming in under that, and I think that demonstrates not just students’ ability to attend, but what the initial hope of all of these programs was: That we could message early and often to students all across the state that if you get into UW-Madison, we can cover this cost for you,” said Derek Kindle, vice provost for enrollment management.

Bucky’s Pell Pathway covers tuition, housing and other costs associated with attending college for in-state students who also qualify for federal Pell Grants. Students learn they qualify for Pell Grants when they submit a federal student aid application; UW-Madison automatically enrolls in-state students in the Pell Pathway program if they have Pell Grants.

This year, nearly 1,100 new students qualified for either of the programs, with 917 of them qualifying for Pell Pathway. In fall 2020, 755 students qualified for the Tuition Promise; in 2021, it was about 800 and in 2022, it was 932.

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Universities of Wisconsin adopted a mirror program, Wisconsin Tuition Promise, that it’s offering to students at the other 12 universities starting this fall, despite the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee declining to fund additional years of the program. That program sets family income at $62,000.

The system does not have numbers indicating what percentage of students at other campuses are enrolled in the Wisconsin Tuition Promise, spokesperson Mark Pitsch said.

UW-Milwaukee has since launched its own tuition promise program for in-state students that will start next fall. There, a third of students are considered low-income and it’s estimated one in five students would qualify for tuition assistance.

For Zheng, the Pell Pathway allows him to further his college education in ways he couldn’t without it.

It’s allowed Zheng to join a lab as a freshman, dedicating his time there instead of also juggling a part-time job to make ends meet. Zheng tried having an off-campus job at the start of the year, but it left him with two or three hours of sleep per night.

“(Pell Pathway) allowed me to be a lot more ambitious, because I don’t feel limited by financial burdens or having to work to sustain myself,” he said. “Because of that, I was able to do a research job and have a very academically challenging path.”

Bucky’s Pell Pathway always had been UW-Madison’s ultimate goal, Financial Aid Director Helen Faith said. But the university started with the Tuition Promise in 2018 as part of a two-pronged strategy: First, administrators needed to ensure the program, supported by philanthropic support, could sustain itself; second, the university needed to start by addressing tuition, the most recognizable piece of the cost of attendance puzzle.

“The general public doesn’t necessarily understand what ‘cost of attendance’ means. That’s one of those terms you throw out there and you instantly you start to draw blanks in people’s expressions, but everybody has a sense of what tuition is,” Faith said. “Especially for students who might be intimidated by the cost of college, that is the piece that frightens students and their families the most.”

The university also needed to support students for more than the first year to get them in the door, Faith said — without continued resources, students are at higher risk of dropping out or transferring elsewhere. Other students opt to make steep sacrifices to stay in school, often at the expense of their health and well-being: They might work more hours, forgo sleep, cut their food budgets or live in their cars to make ends meet, Faith added.

Since 2018, private donations to Bucky’s Tuition Promise have covered thousands in tuition costs annually, although UW-Madison doesn’t have a figure for the program. Tuition promise awards often don’t cover a student’s full cost of tuition, but rather pick up the remainder after scholarships or grants have been used.

In addition to tuition, however, students also have to pay segregated fees, which support myriad campus departments and student organizations. Students purchase their own school supplies and often have to pay for books and other necessary course materials.

And then there’s housing and meals, which for in-state students living on campus cost more than tuition and segregated fees combined. Off-campus, housing for a year often costs more than tuition, as rents typically start at about $750 a month for a single bed or a shared room and can reach $1,000 or higher.

An average cost of attendance is typically three times higher than tuition, Faith said. It’s often a deterring cost for low-income families, Faith added, as many are averse to debt borrowing.

“Those students also, after completing school, don’t have the same kind of family safety nets to help them to be successful in repaying those loans,” Faith said. “So, it was important to us to design a program that allowed students to be able to complete college without loans, and particularly focusing on Wisconsin residents, making sure that we are really keeping our most-talented students here at UW-Madison from the state of Wisconsin.”

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Freshman Emily Hokanson has dreamed of being a veterinarian since childhood when she and her grandfather would catch frogs in the river behind his house. Her grandfather, Kris Hokanson, helped cultivate her curiosity as the number of animal species at his house grew. Together, they bred fish and raised tadpoles.

Hokanson, a Sussex native, knew she wouldn’t bank on family assistance to afford that pre-veterinary program, though. The oldest of four kids, Hokanson’s mother, Mollie, supports her and her siblings on a single teacher’s salary and is still paying off her own college debt. Having the Pell Pathway will allow Hokanson to start a graduate veterinary program with no debt.

“I’m going to have to go to school for eight years regardless for what I want to do. And knowing that I don’t have to pay for my bachelor’s education is going to make graduate school a lot more doable for me, because that would have been well over the amount that I was able to pay,” Hokanson said.

Without Bucky’s Pell Pathway, UW-Madison freshman Aaliyah Golden-Whitehead would have needed gap years before starting college to avoid placing a further financial burden on her family.

Golden-Whitehead, who grew up in Kenosha, and her sister have both spent the better part of the last few years working to support her mother. A few years ago, her mother contracted COVID-19 while working as a Navy dental technician. The impact of COVID-19, in conjunction with other chronic health issues, led her to resign. She now pieces together part-time jobs and relies on her daughters for financial stability.

Golden-Whitehead was at first confused upon learning she would receive the Pell Pathway grant, but confusion quickly gave way to excitement. With the grant, she’s able to be a fully committed student.

“Once I figured out what the scholarship really meant I was more than relieved,” Golden-Whitehead said. “This scholarship meant that I could finally give my full attention to my studies. My family screamed, actually screamed and cheered.”