SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Marcy will be able to offer more scholarship money to nursing students starting in the fall of 2027 thanks to an endowment from a foundation that has supported the college for decades.
The Julia O. Wells Memorial Education Foundation, Inc. is establishing a $750,000 permanently endowed scholarship fund at SUNY Poly, officials announced during a signing ceremony on July 15 in the college library.
Interest earned from the endowment annually will fund scholarships for nursing students at a time when there is a national and regional shortage of registered nurses.
“This is a significant increase in what we’re able to offer moving forward,” said Andrea LaGatta, SUNY Poly vice president of institutional advancement.
About the memorial foundation
The memorial foundation has already given the college nearly $850,000 over the past 38 years, funding scholarships for 600 students.
Foundation board member Bonnie Bazyk said that she, as well as two other board members, is a graduate of the Albany Memorial School of Nursing and of SUNY Poly.
The foundation’s mission, she said, is to advance nursing by supporting education.
“Thank you to SUNY Polytechnic Institute,” Bazyk said, “for helping us to grow nurses.”
SUNY Poly President Winston Soboyejo noted that the college’s nursing program celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.
“This extraordinary gift reflects a shared belief in the power of education to transform lives while addressing one of our region’s greatest needs,” he said.
Soboyejo pointed out that several members of the college’s nursing faculty had received scholarships from the foundation during their student days.
One of them, Francia Reed, who recently retired as a clinical assistant professor and chair of the undergraduate nursing program, addressed the gathering to talk about what the scholarship had meant to her. Reed went back to school to earn her B.S. in nursing as a newlywed nearly 40 years ago, she said.
She kept working while studying, always wondering if she and her husband could really afford her degree, Reed said. The scholarship, though, eased both her financial and mental stress, she said.
Scholarships can end the need for students to work overtime or take on a second job, giving them more time and energy for their studies, Reed said.
Nursing at SUNY Poly
SUNY Poly offers B.S. degrees in nursing as well as advanced degrees for family nurse practitioners, psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners and nurse educators.
Although many of the degrees SUNY Poly offers involve fields and technology that didn’t exist a decade or two ago, its health sciences programs remain one of the college’s three main academic thrusts, Soboyejo said. (The other two are advanced manufacturing, and advanced communications and quantum, he said.)
Manufacturers may be the top employers in the state, but health care is the second biggest employer, he pointed out.
“At the heart of what we do is graduate people to go on and support the community,” Soboyejo said.
And, in this community as well as throughout the state, there is a shortage of registered nurses, a shortage SUNY Poly graduates can help to fill, he said. Their graduates don’t just learn about the science in their jobs, he said.
The college’s goal is “to graduate nurses that care and have compassion and go on to pursue careers in the community and take those values with them,” he said.
But Soboyejo pointed out that all three of the college’s major areas are facilitated by artificial intelligence, research and innovation. And hopefully SUNY Poly can connect with that kind of new technology, such as medical robotics, that will give them an advantage o the job, he said.
Nursing shortage
Here are some statistics that show a growing demand for nurses and a supply shortage:
A fact sheet from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing lists a number of factors as contributing to the growing demand for nurses and the shortage including an aging population; an aging RN workforce nearing retirement age; a scarcity of nursing faculty to train more nurses; and too many nurses leaving the profession, in part because of stress due to understaffing.
The foundation
Julia O. Wells graduated from the Memorial Hospital Training School for Nurses in Albany in 1918. She later inherited money from her parents and decided to leave it to the Albany Memorial Hospital School of Nursing Alumnae Association.
The association decided to create a separate foundation to honor Wells’ gift in 1984 that was then incorporated in 1988.
Since then, it has given almost $5 million in nursing scholarships, including nearly $850,000 to the SUNY Poly Foundation. Those scholarships have supported both high school graduates earning nursing degrees and nurses who have gone back to school for more advanced degrees, foundation President Kathleen Santarcangelo said.
The foundation is now dissolving and is distributing its funds as endowed scholarships at colleges of nursing to continue its legacy, she said. The other colleges receiving funds are Russell Sage College in Troy, recipient of the largest endowment; Maria College in Albany; Excelsior University in Albany; and Empire State University. SUNY Poly is receiving the second largest endowment.
Asked why, Santarcangelo noted how many nurses the college has trained, what a good job it does and what good stewardship the college has shown of memorial foundation funds it received over the past 40 years.
“Nursing is totally in demand,” Santarcangelo said. “We cannot educate and get nurses out there fast enough.”
This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Gift will fund more SUNY Poly scholarships at time of nursing shortage
Reporting by Amy Neff Roth, Utica Observer Dispatch / Observer-Dispatch
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By Amy Neff Roth, Utica Observer Dispatch | USA TODAY Network
