Gala reception honors newest Mayor's Scholars

With television news cameras rolling at City Hall yesterday, Mayor Ed Rendell and University President Judith Rodin honored Penn's latest investment -- 34 freshman "Mayor's Scholars" who were awarded a total of $722,501. The students will receive an annual award of an average $20,633, almost entirely in grants. Application for the largely need-based gifts is open to any incoming freshman who graduates from a Philadelphia high school. "We believe the Mayor's Scholarship program is the best scholarship program -- not only in any Ivy League school, but in the nation," Rendell said. The 127 scholars "are pretty much getting a full ride to the University, so it's quite a complete package," said Heather Heard, administrative assistant to Admissions Dean Lee Stetson. They must submit financial aid forms every year, and sometimes awards are adjusted. But as long as a recipient keeps a decent grade point average, scholarship renewal is "pretty automatic," said Mayor's Scholar Alina Khavulya, a College junior who graduated from George Washington High School. The warm reception stood in sharp contrast to the controversy surrounding the program in the early 1990s, when attorneys for the Public Interest Law Center of Pennsylvania sued the University and the city to force them to fund a total of more than 500 Mayor's Scholars, not the 125 that Penn supported at the time. In the lawsuit, PILCO lawyers alleged that a 1977 municipal agreement -- in which the University receives 50 acres of rent-free land from the city in exchange for funding the scholarships -- required the additional scholarships. But in 1993, Common Pleas Court Judge Nelson Diaz ruled that the University fulfilled its obligation to the city with 125 scholarships, although he accused the University of underfunding the awards and labeled the program "a sham in the name of a scholarship." The 1993 court decision ended the University's practice of awarding Mayor's Scholarships to Philadelphia residents who had attended high school outside the city -- a practice which City Councilperson Augusta Clark said had allowed Penn "to look somewhere else when looking for scholarship students." Yesterday, Clark -- a member of the program's selection committee -- praised Rodin's intensified search for qualified candidates, adding that "she's found a bumper crop [of scholars]." And Rodin said the "Mayor's Scholarship program used to be a source of contention between the University and the city, and it isn't any more." For many new Scholars, the program's large tuition subsidy made long-held desires to attend Penn more realistic. College freshman Rita Kubicky -- a graduate of the Philadelphia High School for Girls -- said she had wanted to attend a local school anyway, and the scholarship simply made the choice obvious. Nursing freshman Daniel Smith -- a graduate of the city's Father Judge High School -- used the scholarship to follow in the footsteps of his brother Dennis, a Nursing junior who is himself a Mayor's Scholar. One new recipient will barely leave home. College Freshman Loc Nguyen attended West Philadelphia's University City High School at 47th and Walnut streets. His family lives only 10 blocks from campus. "I was looking for a school close by," Nguyen said, adding that the only other school he considered was Drexel. In his remarks to the new Scholars, Rendell said that "by far the most enjoyable period of my life was the four years I spent at Penn as an undergraduate." But Rendell warned the Scholars that college brings "the need to impose a level of self-discipline on yourself. I must say I didn't always impose that level of self-discipline on myself -- but I tried."

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