BY ANDREA TORTORA
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HIGHLAND HEIGHTS -- To recruit more academically successful students from the Tristate, Northern Kentucky University made an offer: score a 29 or better on the ACT and you can attend college for free.
The carte blanche invitation proved a great tool. Of 40 offers extended, 22 students have accepted the free tuition for an NKU education. They'll save more than $6,874 a year in tuition, room and board if they're Kentucky students and $10,474 in tuition, room and board for out-of-state students.
No other Tristate college offers an incentive quite like NKU's -- a strictly merit-based scholarship that grants full tuition. School officials are surprised how many students are actually taking the college up on the full-ride scholarship.
"I am pleasantly surprised," NKU President James Votruba said Tuesday. "NKU has not generally offered this level of scholarship support to the area's best-prepared students."
The scholarships are one way that NKU is using to recruit a more diverse student body and keep the region's top academic achievers in the area. Students who score a 29 or higher on the ACT are in the top 5 percent of students taking the test nationwide.
A specific breakdown of the hometowns for the 22 scholarship recipients was not available Tuesday.
Other Tristate colleges offer similar incentives, but nothing that compares to what NKU has created.
At the University of Cincinnati, students with high scores on the SAT or ACT, or a valedictorian or salutatorian, are invited to compete for partial and full scholarships. Greg Hand, UC spokesman, said five students in the Class of 1999 received full scholarships after this year's competition.
That fact that 22 students chose NKU over more prestigious colleges means opinions about NKU are changing, Dr. Votruba said.
Dr. Votruba said the interest also reflects a public perception that students can get a good education close to home. But it also means that the university will need to speed plans to create an honors program and offer more sophisticated classes.
The scholarships are part of the school's push to recruit the brightest high school graduates as well as non-traditional students with a late interest in higher education.
The school's strategic plan gives high priority to student recruitment and retention, as well as developing a more aggressive and comprehensive strategy for marketing the university.
The school will use part of a $4.4 million investment to enhance student recruitment and retention, hire full-time and part-time faculty and improve campus facilities.
"Because we are a young university, we have to spend more time getting the word out," Dr. Votruba said. "And part of our five-year agenda is to be more prepared for the best-prepared students."
