With all of his financial aid exhausted by the time he reached his junior year at Georgia State University (GSU), Luis Perez began to wonder if he would ever receive his bachelor’s degree.
“It’s completely stressful going into your senior year knowing you don’t have the money and everyone else is talking about graduation,” Perez says. “And it’s like, ‘Will I even make it to that?’”
Already working as a full-time janitor, Perez took on a second job as an overnight caretaker.
“So I started doing that and it was awful because I couldn’t focus on school,” Perez says. “I was making money to pay for school but I couldn’t focus because I was tired.”
In dire need of a solution, Perez began to search for scholarships. After applying for a dozen or so, he won a scholarship for $1,000 but it still wasn’t enough to cover the cost of his last few semesters at GSU, where the average annual cost is more than $15,000.
Perez continued to search and soon discovered the school’s Panther Retention Grant program. The program was created by GSU in 2011 to “fill the gaps” between what students have paid and what they owe so that they don’t have to drop out or stop out of school because of small shortfalls in resources, says GSU Vice Provost Timothy M. Renick, who also serves as vice president for enrollment management and student success at the institution.
