What May Be America’s Oldest Place-Based College Scholarship Celebrates 100th Anniversary - Forbes

This June marks the 100th anniversary of what is in all likelihood the nation’s oldest, continuously operating place-based college scholarship. Think of it as the first of what are now often called Promise scholarships, where private donors establish a college scholarship fund for students from a specific city, region, or high school.

The story of this unique legacy is told in a new, meticulously researched, highly readable book entitled Bernard Daly’s Promise: The Enduring Legacy of a Place-Based Scholarship, authored by Sam Stern and published by Oregon State University Press.

Stern, who is professor and dean emeritus of the College of Education at Oregon State University, undertook the task of researching the rags-to-riches saga of Bernard Daly, the history of the Daly scholarship, and the remarkable impact it’s had on thousands of students from Lake County, Oregon, a rural, mostly lower-income, conservative county in the high desert region of the state. The result is a richly detailed, often inspiring, account of how one man’s visionary generosity continues to change the lives of so many individuals by making higher education available to them.

Here, briefly, is how the scholarship came about.

Bernard Daly immigrated with his family to America from Ireland in the aftermath of that country’s Great Famine. After a few intermediate stops, he earned his medical degree from the University of Louisville and ended up locating in 1887 in tiny Lakeview, Oregon (population of about 300 people at the time) where he became the town’s only physician.

Daly prospered and, in addition to serving as Lakeview’s doctor, he ultimately became a state legislator, county judge, rancher, banker, and state leader, amassing a fortune along the way.

When he died in 1920, his will specified that almost all of his estate, valued at the time at about one million dollars, would be used to establish a college scholarship to “assist worthy and ambitious young men and women of my beloved county of Lake to acquire a good education...”

He further directed that the Bernard Daly Fund support “as may students as possible, not less than fifteen each and every year” to attend “the schools, colleges and technical schools in the state of Oregon, bearing all the expenses through school, if necessary, until their education is completed.”

And that, as we learn from Stern’s book, is exactly what happened, starting in 1922. And it continues to happen for high school graduates from Lake County “each and every year.”

The corpus of the original scholarship endowment has now grown to several million dollars, and, inspired by Daly’s example, many other Lake Countians, themselves often recipients of a Daly scholarship, have made their own private contributions so that now the various scholarship funds available to students from the county totals about $20 million.

In fact, Stern told me that Lake County may have the most privately endowed college scholarship funds of any county in America. Currently, about 45 or 50 Lake County students annually receive scholarships from the Daly fund and its derivatives. The average scholarship is worth about $10,000 a year for four years of college study. The funds are administered by a board of trustees that follows selection rules that remain faithful to Daly’s original intent.

The impact of the scholarship is simply stunning, and Stern does a superb job of chronicling the stories of dozens of the scholarship recipients who’ve gone on to have highly influential careers as lawyers, physicians, pharmacists, journalists, civil servants, military officers and college faculty.

Along the way, he situates the scholarship in the larger higher education landscape as it has unfolded over the past 100 years, including topics such as the GI Bill, the Higher Education Act of 1965, the crisis of college affordability and student loan debt, and higher education’s impact on social mobility.

The Daly Scholarship has had a profound impact on educational attainment in Lake County, Consider these outcomes:

About 25% of Lakeview High School students take calculus, compared to the national average of 15%;
92% of Lake County high school students graduate in four years, compared to the state average of 79%;
44% of Lake County youth graduate from college, placing it in the 89th percentile, nationally;
And the percentage of Lake County children who move from families with the lowest 20% of household income to the highest 20% as adults is one of the highest of any county in the nation.

Stern calls the Daly Fund an American Dream Machine that’s transformed thousands of lives, inspired a community, and stands as a testimony to the power of education.

As he told me in a recent phone call, “In a time of uncertainty for higher education, Bernard Daly’s Promise is an important story of hope for the future that comes from an unlikely place and time. For a century, the Daly scholarship has moved Oregon youth from modest circumstances to extraordinarily successful lives – not just them, but also their children and grandchildren. It’s a hundred-year-old story that does much to inform our thinking about higher education.”

Adblock test (Why?)