Portland State Magazine Spring 2015

20 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE SPRING 2015 ON A RAINY evening last October, Nancy Ryles’ old friends gathered in Northwest Portland to welcome Claire Feetham to the sisterhood. They dined on chicken satay, with specialty waffles for dessert, and shared stories about Ryles, an Oregon legislator who died of brain cancer in 1990. Ryles’ friends created a scholarship in her name and Feetham, a PSU senior and single mom, is the latest bene- ficiary of their generosity. The Nancy Ryles Scholarship has allowed Feetham to focus on her studies and her five-year-old daughter, Guinevere. Without the scholarship, she’d be buried in bills. “I would have a mountain of debt, that’s for sure,” Feetham says. “I would have a crippling mountain of debt.” Feetham’s story is familiar to the thousands of students at PSU who rely on loans, scholarships and other forms of financial aid to stay in school and earn a degree. To support these students, the PSU Foundation is raising over $50 million for scholarships through the Creating Futures campaign. Creating Futures is designed to attract top students to PSU and broaden access to higher education for those who wouldn’t otherwise have the resources to graduate. “Part of our mission to serve the city is to make our academic excellence as accessible as possible,” PSU President Wim Wiewel says. “Scholarships make that happen.” The Creating Futures campaign has already made a mea- surable impact at PSU. Since it launched on July 1, 2012, an additional 122 scholarships have been established at PSU, an increase of more than 20 percent. In the same period, PSU’s scholarship endowment has grown from $17.5 to $29.4 million. But it still lags considerably behind the scholarship endowments of the University of Oregon ($162 million) and Oregon State University ($175 million). A BACHELOR’S degree remains a valuable asset in today’s job market. A recent report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed that workers with a bachelor’s degree earn over $1 million more throughout their working lives, com- pared to those with only a high school diploma. But paying for a bachelor’s degree has grown increasingly difficult. In Oregon, state support for the cost of higher edu- cation has dropped from 80 percent to 12 percent in the past two decades, leading to steep tuition hikes. The funding cuts have been especially painful at PSU, where half of the students are the first in their families to attend college and nearly 60 percent rely on financial aid. “With the skyrocketing cost of higher education, for many people it becomes unattainable,” says PSU graduate Barre Stoll, who sits on the PSU Foundation Board of Trustees and the Creating Futures steering committee. “Without people getting college educations, we’re dooming our community to mediocrity.” Even graduates are hindered by the prohibitive cost of a college degree. In 2013, PSU students borrowed $153 million, leaving many with debt that limits their future and their families. Theresa Just, who completed a licensure program at the PSU Graduate School of Education in 2014, is a learning specialist at a high-poverty Portland-area elementary school. She received a Capps Family Scholarship and a Renaissance Foundation Scholarship while she was at PSU. “If it wasn’t for the scholarships,” she says, “I wouldn’t have been able to make it through the program.” Just believes that, for many people, scholarships will elimi- nate the biggest obstacle blocking their path to a college degree and a better job. “A lot of great people are debating whether or not to go back to school,” she says. “Any help you can get makes it easier.” Annie Lai is a sophomore at PSU and the recipient of the Vincent K. Seid, M.D., Scholarship. She’s studying biology and Chinese and hopes to go to medical school after she graduates in 2018. Lai and her younger sister grew up in Southeast Portland. Their parents emigrated from Cambodia and China. Lai is the WR I T T E N B Y S T EVE B EAVEN Scholarship campaign changes students’ lives.