Mietta Smith was 5 when her mother returned to school to pursue a bachelor’s degree.
Smith doesn’t remember her mother going to college, but she does remember the steadfast emphasis her mother placed on earning a college degree—and the concerns they both had about affording college. Smith also remembers the excitement in her mother’s voice when she called home to tell her mom they could worry a little less.
The youngest in her family and the first among her siblings to go to college, Smith is the first of two Isabel Courtney Hall Music Education Scholarship recipients.
The family of Isabel Courtney Hall (BFA ’46, BSED ’47) established the scholarship, benefitting undergraduates in the College of Fine Arts who demonstrate financial need and academic merit, in her memory and seized an opportunity to stretch the impact of their generosity a little further.
Their gift qualified for OHIO’s Undergraduate Scholarship Investment Program. Known as The OHIO Match, the six-year program provides $0.50 in University matching funds for every dollar committed to eligible scholarship endowments. In the program’s first five years, donors contributed $8.52 million in eligible gifts, resulting in $4.26 million in matching University funds and the awarding of more than $580,000 in scholarship funding over the past three fiscal years.
“This scholarship definitely makes a difference,” says Smith who is finishing her first year as a music education major. “It would be a lot harder, and a lot more stressful for me and my mom, to make my monthly payments without this help.”
The OHIO Match ends June 30, 2019, and was recently expanded to include OHIO’s regional campuses and donor-specified programs. For more information, visit https://ohiotoday.org/news/2019/01/18/ohio-match-update/.