Headline: Who gets state dollars to help pay for college in Mississippi?
Given that my final article’s topic will be about scholarships in Mississippi, I wanted to choose a relevant piece related to that subject. This article was fairly recently written and comes from Mississippi Today. .It discusses state-funded financial aid during fiscal year 2017.
The headline of this piece made me click on it in the first place. It’s a question, and a question that I hope to answer. I wanted to read more about how the article answered the question. The article’s opening was poignant and also drew me in – the author writes about how the most financial needy students in Mississippi are barred from receiving one of Mississippi’s primary grants and has a quote from the state director of Student Financial Aid, further drilling that point home.
The point of my final multimedia project concerns financial aid over intercessions, specifically, and hopes to investigate why there are such few minority students in these courses over break. This article, though it doesn’t specifically discuss that, does touch on which minorities are receiving the majority of these state-funded scholarships and grants, and the statistics surprised me. Caucasian students in Mississippi received 73% of financial aid in 2017.
I was glad to see a graphic in the form of a pie chart on the page – it made identifying the demographics much easier. However, I was surprised to see how poorly it was designed. It was also interesting to see what types of students were receiving MESG, as it is a scholarship I was also awarded. Most of these students are from private schools.
The article touched closer on what I am interested in towards the middle about Pell grants. Though students who are eligible for a full Pell grant almost always receive them, the grants do not come close to paying for the cost of college. There is another confusing graphic a few paragraphs below this information.
I liked that the article was split into sub-sections. However, I was disappointed in the quotes and sources in this piece. I have noticed that there is practically no contact information for any state financial aid administrators online, and that finding that information requires quite a lot of digging, so kudos to the author for getting in touch with the director of state aid. However, she relies on her quotes for the majority of the article and shoves in a couple sources towards the last few paragraphs of the piece.
Though I understand that articles and their purposes’ vary, resulting in a different approach, (and this article was more of an informative piece than a feature) I feel like if the author had gotten in touch with a family or student who was directly affected, it would have been a much more effective article. That is the source that this story lacks. It has data and a strong primary source in Rogers, but I wish it would have expanded on the thoughts of the Alcorn State University president and Hinds County senator mentioned at the end.
Devna Bose - Journalism 377 