FOUNDATIONS
Boosting the Bottom Line
Generous alumni give more than $270,000 to support scholarship endowments, which have dropped in value during the recession.
When Joseph Colson Jr. established a scholarship endowment at NC State 10 years ago, he did it to honor his father. So when NC State called a few months ago to ask him for some additional support for the endowment, the alumnus asked himself, “what would my father do?”
Sending talented students to college, his father would have said, is worth the price.
“It didn’t require a whole lot of soul searching to do it,” Colson said. “We just thought it was the right thing to do.”
Thanks to the generous support of Colson and other alumni, the College raised $273,630 to support endowments that were “under water,” which means the endowments were worth less than their original value with no scholarship funds available for distribution to students. Endowment funds are typically placed in more conservative long term investment instruments, but when the stock market lost more than half its value in late 2008 and 2009, many endowments suffered.
But when NC State development officials asked alumni to help prop up their endowments, they responded in droves. Eighty-one percent of those asked contributed. Combined with additional funds from engineering departments and the Chancellor’s office, the College was able to renew scholarships for all eligible students.
“We can’t thank our alumni enough for their generous gifts in support of these endowments,” said Ben Hughes, executive director of the NC State Engineering Foundation. “This additional support will help ensure that scholarship funds are available for our top engineering students, some of whom might otherwise have to take out additional loans, take on after-school work or, worst of all, possibly have to drop out of college.”
Among those students are the beneficiaries of the Dr. Joseph S. Colson Scholarship Endowment, which supports several merit scholarships for engineering students at NC State. The scholarship was the younger Colson’s way of helping out, something with which his father, a longtime Granville County physician for whom the scholarship is named, was intimately familiar.
Joseph Colson Jr., who graduated from NC State in 1968 with a B.S. in electrical engineering, parlayed his engineering education into a long and successful career with AT&T and Lucent Technologies. In 1993, he was named one of America’s most powerful black executives by Black Enterprise magazine. The College named him a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus in 2001 in recognition of his accomplishments.
Colson credits his education at NC State with much of his success, yet another reason why he chose to give back to the College during this difficult economic period.
“These students are our future,” Colson said, “and we
must invest in their success.” 