Students awarded the Elevate Scholarship from Mountain America Credit Union. Image courtesy of Mountain America Credit Union.
LOGAN – In 2024, 120 students throughout six states will be awarded a share of $300,000 to help with their costs of higher education courtesy of Mountain America Credit Union’s Elevate Scholarship. In its inaugural year, over 1300 applications were received for the scholarship program operated by the Mountain America Foundation.
Last year six students from Cache Valley received $2,500 each to aid them in their academics and Marissa Bernards is hoping more students get that opportunity in the future. Bernards is the director of government and community engagement for Mountain America Credit Union and says the application period for the scholarships opened on December 11th and continues through February 11, 2024.
“We want to get as many applicants as we can,” Bernards exclaims. “We’re excited as we’re going into our second year to know that building off of last year and going into this year we’re hopeful to have even more applicants, which will be a lot of fun to review.”
To qualify, students must reside within one of six states that comprise the Mountain America Credit Union footprint, including Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Utah, New Mexico and Nevada. Students can fill out an application at macu.com/graduate where much of the criteria and forms are available. A student’s academics only accounts for 20% of the evaluation.
“The other 80% is really focused on trying to look at the student as an individual,” says Bernards. “We look a lot at work ethic; we look at how they show up as a leader in their community, in their school; we look at the service they give in their community or opportunities they find to make a difference in their local area. We ask a couple questions about core values, things like that. Really we try to get a broader picture about who they are.”
Bernards says they ask for letters of recommendation to get a perspective from an outside source as well.
Besides being available for the class of 2024, students who may have taken a gap year can apply. And even those who may be a bit further removed from high school due to military, religious or humanitarian service can apply for the scholarships if they plan to attend higher education in the fall of 2024.
“We wanted to account for that group who doesn’t start higher ed right away, but is really excited to and maybe takes another opportunity for a short while.”
The program is also flexible enough to account for various forms of post-high school education, as Bernards says higher education looks different for everyone.
“Our scholarship is not for a specific degree, or a specific program, or a specific type of school,” she explains. “It can actually be applied to four-year universities, two-year colleges and even technical vocational schools, as long as they have what we call a federal school code.”
That code can be found on the FAFSA government website. And Bernards says there was a wide variety of schools that were noted among last year’s scholarship award winners, focusing on areas of study from law and engineering, to culinary arts and welding.
Once all the applications are received, they go through a multi-step screening process.
“We actually do have a very large review committee who participates,” says Bernards. “Most of them are actually Mountain America team members, team members from across our footprint – whether that is a branch manager or a teller from one of our locations or a member of one of our corporate teams – just a really diverse group that we bring together. Then all the applications are anonymously reviewed. We remove all of the identifiers.”
Bernards says candidates are not earmarked to be from certain geographic areas or of a certain demographic, giving each applicant an equal chance. Winning candidates will be notified in April and scholarship funds will be directed specifically to institutions in the summer.