Makenzie Hill, a criminal justice student at Clark Atlanta University, learned this month that a $10,000 scholarship will follow her into the next stage of her education. “It is a reminder that there are people who believe in students like me and are willing to invest in their futures,” she said. “I hope to use my education to stand up for those whose voices have often been overlooked.”
Hill is one of 50 students sharing $500,000 through the Bridging the Dream Scholarship Program, announced November 4 by The Sallie Mae Fund in partnership with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. Thirty of the recipients are high school seniors and 20 are graduate students. Every award is $10,000, and selection rested on financial need, academic achievement, leadership and service.
The partnership has moved real money since 2021. Between Bridging the Dream and its companion program, Completing the Dream, The Sallie Mae Fund has awarded more than $5.5 million to nearly 1,500 students. The sharper fact in this year’s round sits inside the recipient lists themselves. Count the names school by school and 34 of the 50 scholars are enrolled at, or bound for, a historically Black college or university.
Among the seniors, four are headed to Tuskegee University. Three each chose Howard University, Florida A&M University and Alabama State University. Two each are bound for Clark Atlanta, Spelman College and Virginia State University, with others headed to Grambling State and Hampton University. The graduate list reaches further across the HBCU map: Nasya Becton at Morehouse School of Medicine, Joseph Hines II at Meharry Medical College, and students at Morgan State, Jackson State, South Carolina State, Southern University, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Delaware State.
“When we invest in students, we invest in the leaders, professionals, and changemakers of tomorrow,” said Dr. Harry L. Williams, president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. “Our partnership with The Sallie Mae Fund helps students continue their education and put their talents to work in their communities.”
Nicolas Jafarieh, an executive vice president at Sallie, framed the awards as one answer to a wider affordability problem. “Making higher education more accessible and affordable means helping students and families use every resource available to them, and scholarships are a critical part of that,” he said.
The timing is deliberate. The awards arrived during National Scholarship Month, with families deep in financial aid paperwork for the coming year. The $10,000 figure matters in that setting because it arrives as grant money. Nothing about it has to be paid back, and it lands at the exact point in the college calendar when a gap in a family’s budget can turn into a withdrawn enrollment.
The fund’s second program works the other end of the degree. Completing the Dream helps students who hit financial trouble close to graduation stay enrolled and finish. Read together, the two programs rest on a plain observation: students most often leave college over money at two predictable moments, the first bill and the last one, and a well-timed $10,000 can keep a degree on schedule at either end.
Hill has already decided what the money is for. The degree she is pursuing at Clark Atlanta is aimed, in her own words, at people “whose voices have often been overlooked.”
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