By JORDAN GREEN, Editor-in-Chief
Are students promised scholarships they don’t always receive? How much money does the university’s Financial Aid office process in a given semester? And how does Northwestern stack up against other schools’ scholarship systems?
These are just a few of the questions the Northwestern News aims to answer in the April 21 and April 28 editions as part of a reporting series called “Money Talks: Examining Northwestern Scholarships.”
In today’s edition, you can read about how a limit on the amount of money students receive in participation scholarships – called a scholarship “cap” – has affected students’ finances. This cap, as readers will learn, is a policy that deserves explaining.
The second story in today’s issue shows how Northwestern’s scholarships stack up against two other universities in Oklahoma: Oklahoma State University’s and Southwestern Oklahoma State University’s. We included this story to give readers the ability to compare and contrast how the schools’ scholarship and financial aid systems are different. We chose these schools because they’re two well-known universities, and their bring diversity to our reporting. Oklahoma State is a larger school, and Southwestern is similar to Northwestern.
We’re reporting on scholarships because they are vitally important to virtually every single college student whether they receive them or not. Students often do not understand how the money they get is handled, and the process of awarding that money is highly complex.
Our aim in this series is to demystify the scholarship situation and address some of relevant topics that affect students.
Our reporters spent countless hours interviewing sources and compiling this information in a logical, readable format so that students can better understand how scholarships work.
Above all, our goal is to present students, faculty, administrators and staff with the information they need to make decisions about their educations and the future of this institution.
We hope you’ll appreciate the information we’ve worked hard to bring to you.