Community colleges like Elgin Community College have strived to serve students: its lower tuition and proximity to home have led to many students to start their college careers at ECC. For one student, the deal will become more advantageous. Beginning this year, the honors program at ECC will annually provide one student with a full-tuition scholarship to North Central College.

NCC is located in downtown Naperville 40 minutes from Elgin.

“NCC is a great campus near Chicago with great opportunities for ECC students,” said Sean Jensen, ECC director of transfer services.  “We provide direct access to NCC from ECC.”

The NCC transfer scholarship will be available to students who have completed 9 credit hours in honors courses or have obtained level one enhanced membership status in ECC’s Phi Theta Kappa honors society chapter. 

Potential scholarship applicants must have a 3.50 cumulative GPA and a 3.0 GPA in all attempted honors courses.

Students who receive the scholarship can expect a seamless transition from ECC to NCC. Aside from the scholarship, there are numerous other partnerships with NCC. 

“ECC has several partnerships with NCC including a transfer guide, a transfer guarantee, and the community college to cardinal checklist which outlines what ECC students should do to stay on track to transfer,” Jensen said. 

Students transferring to NCC should also have rest of mind knowing that the ECC and NCC partnership has deep roots that began in 2015 with guaranteed admission partnership to NCC for ECC international students.

“We expanded the guaranteed admission to the entire ECC student body in 2019,” said Nick DeFalco, director of transfer admissions at NCC.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shutdowns had little to no effect on this partnership and the expansion of opportunities available to students looking to transfer to NCC. 

“Right around this time last year, we began discussing the idea of a full transfer scholarship,” Jensen said. “We wanted to make sure that the scholarship was going to be accessible to as many students as possible.” 

The scholarship will encourage students who aim to receive it to strive for academic excellence and involvement on campus while at ECC.

“The honors program wants students to get involved and we want the scholarship to be an incentive for students to go beyond joining PTK and the Honors program and be further involved at ECC,” said Jason Kane, professor of English and honors program director at ECC. “The hope is that once you get involved you stay involved. You start doing one thing and then it snowballs. Honors scholarships like this one may be what lead future generations of ECC students to get involved. You have to get students to do that first thing–to nibble, but many students don’t bite. Hopefully, the scholarship hooks students to bite.”

In making the scholarship for those students involved in the honors program and on campus, the scholarship not only seeks to reach a vast number of students but also rewards those that took the bite.

“We wanted to reward high achieving ECC students who had a challenging curriculum and extracurricular involvement,” DeFalco said.

For many students, the process of transferring is confusing and can seem overwhelming to students, however the scholarship, and similar articulation agreements with other institutions, will illuminate pathways that students can follow. 

“With this parternership, students at Elgin can see a clear path and a road map to earning a bachelor’s degree which makes the student experience easier and less stressful,” Defalco said.

Honors students looking to apply to the scholarship need to send in an application, two letters of recommendation from ECC faculty, and the required essay by March 12, 2021, to [email protected].