Social media accounts for universities are used to play up admissions. We encounter colorful, exciting posts urging us to “apply today,” but where is the fanfare for graduating? Where’s the excitement and over-the-top urging to finish what we have started?
College has become unbearably expensive. Louisiana’s TOPS funding has been declining, and now there’s talk of raising the standards for receiving the scholarship to be able to afford more money to those with the scholarship. 
In November 2016 , Gov. John Bel Edwards said students would only receive about 40 percent of their TOPS money for the now current semester. Since they aren’t given as much money, people are more likely to drop out if the costs outweigh the benefits and if debt becomes too much. 
The good thing about college is that it does not have to be finished in four years. But the issue then becomes, how will students support themselves while in school and accruing debt year after year?  
Many students work a job or two to pay off their loans or cover what isn’t paid for by their scholarships. Others are fortunate enough to be able to afford it, but the bottom line is  once you begin your college path, there seems to be little help in giving scholarships that last longer than the average college student’s graduation plan. 
A March 14 article in the New York Times told the story of Khalif Robinson, a student at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, who got the extra funding he needed when his scholarship ran out through GSU’s Panther Retention Grant. He only had a few credit hours left to finish and the grant was his saving grace.
Robinson is a straight-A student who will be starting a fellowship in Washington, D.C. where he will study foreign affairs and train to be a diplomat. Suffice it to say, Robinson isn’t a slacker and he isn’t a bad student, he just does not have the money.  
The grant offers students an immediate few hundred dollars and is usually granted to seniors whose financial aid has run out. The article continued to tell Robinson’s story, but the part that struck me was when it said that GSU was the first university to implement something like this back in 2012, and there are only about a dozen more institutions with similar programs. 
A dozen is not a high number for something that seems to be working, at least for GSU. 
Since the implementation of the program, the school says that 70 percent  of the recipients of the grant go from seniors just short of graduating, to college graduates after the money is deposited. 
According to a December 2016 report from hechingerreport.org, college enrollment is down for the fifth straight year.Most of the drop outs were over 24, which means that if a program like the Panther Retention Grant existed in more institutions, these rates may not be as high. 
People like Robinson who are ambitious, high-achieving students should not have to delay or forego their college degrees because they can’t afford them. Even after working many shifts and being full-time students, some people just can’t get it done and they end up in mounds of student debt, with no degree. 
I don’t have a solution nor do I have a suggestion of where money for a fund like this could come from, especially in Louisiana’s current financial state.
However, grants like this could boost the number of people who are getting degrees, which makes them more marketable and can lead to a drop in unemployment — perhaps not a significant drop, but a drop, nonetheless. 
Colleges need to commit to helping students through the finish line after giving them the confidence and support to start in the first place. 
Myia Hambrick is a 21-year-old mass communication major from Temple, Georgia.