Comprising 35 students, the Park Scholars class of 2022 announced this past May contains the lowest number of recipients since the program began in 1996, largely due to lack of funding.

The Park Scholars Program at NC State offers a few dozen students a full-ride scholarship to NC State each year. According to Eva Feucht, the director of the Park Scholarship Program, the number of first-year students who receive a scholarship varies each year and this year the number is one of the lowest to date.

“35 is the smallest that this program has had, except for in 1996,” Feucht said. “The very first class was selected for this program — there were 25 in that class. But ever since it’s been in the 40s or 50s, sometimes even in the 60s. But the funding has changed, the class has changed. Many things have changed in 22 years.”

According to Joy Tongsri, the associate director for the Park Scholars Program, 2,116 first-year students applied for the scholarship this year. She also said that applicants are evaluated as a whole.

“We have a holistic review process in terms of selection,” Tongsri said. “So, we consider a lot of different aspects of students: their application, their experiences they’ve had, those kinds of things and we try to take into consideration context. So, we know that students from more-resourced areas have generally had more opportunities than students from lower-resourced areas.”

Reneé Tutchton, assistant director for the Park Scholarship Program, said the program stays true to the University’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. However, while the incoming Park Scholars can supply biographies with information about themselves, Tongsri said that demographics, like gender identity, race and ethnicity, are protected under FERPA (a federal privacy law).

“My understanding is that we cannot release personally identifying information about students without their consent,” Tongsri said. “So, with small classes, you know if we have 40 students, gender identity is a little bit different but in terms of race and ethnicity, you could make assumptions.”

According to Feucht, students can be considered for a Park Scholarship through one of two ways.

“One, is that they are endorsed by their high school and the other would be that they self-endorse,” Feucht said. “So, we invite the high schools in North Carolina and some out-of-state schools to endorse two students who they think are the best qualified in terms of our criteria.”

Tutchton said that the program has about 900 schools from around the country that can submit two endorsements each year. Schools who want to be able to endorse students for the Park Scholarship Program can apply by submitting an application.

“Over the summer, we review all of the requests from the previous year and we will take it on a case-by-case basis based on the profile the school has provided,” Tutchton said. “This year for example, everyone who submitted a school profile became an endorsing partner because we want to encourage schools to have a better understanding of who we are as a program and we want to work with them and form these relationships with them.”

Tongsri said that while the Park Scholarship Program considers many different student qualifications, a student’s financial need is not one of them.

“Looking at our selection criteria, scholarship, service, leadership and character,” Tongsri said. “So, for example, need is not something we consider. Some scholarships do and sometimes people assume that Park Scholarships looks at need, but we don’t as a criterion for selection.”

To help select semi-finalists out of thousands of students, the Park Program has a Regional Selection Committee comprised of volunteers.

“[The Regional Selection Committee is a] group of people, mostly NC State alumni — there’s a handful of parents and friends of the university in there as well,” Feucht said. “So, they read applications and they use an online training that we provide to help them understand what we’re looking for.”

According to Tongsri, this year 390 semi-finalists were interviewed by the Regional Selection Committee, which was then narrowed down to 112 finalists who visited NC State in February.

“There’s a final committee that uses the feedback from the interviewers,” Feucht said. “That final committee includes a dean from one of the colleges, the director of undergraduate admissions, and the chair of the Park Scholarship advisory committee and me. And we use the input from finals weekend to identify who to offer the Park Scholarship to.”

Scholarships are offered in early March with an acceptance deadline of May 1. However, all finalists receive the Provost Academic Award, which is $10,000 from NC State, receiving $2,500 a year for four years.

The program receives funding each year from a variety of donors to finance the scholarships, but the amount of money varies from year to year, resulting in a different number of scholars in each class.

“The number of Park Scholars is based on the amount of funding that we have in a given year for the class,” Feucht said. “This year, we have funding for 35. Next year, we’ll have funding for at least 40.”

The scholarships are largely funded by the Park Foundation, which was established by NC State graduate Roy Park. Located in Ithaca, New York, the foundation funds different areas of interest of the Park family, such as education and environmental organizations. It recently gave a large donation to the Park Program to ensure funding for years to come.

“Recently, five years ago, they announced a gift to NC State to help us begin an endowment here for the program, because up until that point, they had been funding us with grants, the same way they fund other causes that they support,” Feucht said. “But in 2013 they announced that they would make a gift here to help us begin our own endowment so that we could be permanently funded.”

While the program is still not fully endowed, it receives donations from not only the Park Foundation, but other individual donors to build toward that goal.

“Ever since then, other donors have been joining in, everything from our own students… to alumni and parents, NC state faculty who are involved in the program and other friends of the university,” Feucht said. “So, we now have more than 25 other endowments the individuals have started to help support the program.”

Those interested in learning more can visit the NC State Park Scholarship Program website.