The UA Scholars Program is designed to reduce the number of Alaska's high school graduates leaving for education and jobs elsewhere. We offer the top 10 percent of students in each qualified high school graduating class in Alaska an $11,000 scholarship to attend the University of Alaska, as an incentive to stay in their home state.

Our progress in this arena has been remarkable. Before the UA Scholars Program began in 1999, only 44 percent of our high school graduates attended college. The University of Alaska got 44 percent of those. Today, nearly 50 percent of our high school graduates go on to college, and the University gets 63 percent of those. This is truly wonderful progress. Our small population base will never allow us to provide all of the workers in all of the skill sets we will need. But in a state with no income tax, every one of those imported workers will use the roads, use the schools, and collect the permanent fund dividend. It is certain that we are best served by training, educating, and retaining every single Alaska resident we can.

Some say that it is natural for youngsters to want to go out and explore. First off, it's not true. Nationally, more than 80 percent of students who go on to college go to college in the state where they graduated from high school. Second, there is something that can be done about it. Simply put, we have to tell them we want them to stay. More than 4,300 of our best and brightest have accepted the UA Scholars Award since its inception. Many of these young people, who would have gone “outside” and not come home, are home. We didn’t change the nature of those students; we changed their awareness and their opportunity. The icing on the cake is the little understood fact that many of our students take advantage of a wide range of exchange programs with universities in the lower forty-eight and with several foreign universities, so our students can have it all.

Today the UA Scholars are changing the University; tomorrow they will change the state.