The University of Wyoming recently agreed to take the lead on figuring out what tuition waivers for Native American students might look like. The issue’s gone back and forth between the university, state legislators and Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribal members for a handful of years. But questions like who it would fund, where the money would come from and if it will even happen are still up in the air.
Navajo Sen. Affie Ellis (R-Cheyenne), Rep. Ember Oakley (R-Riverton), Eastern Shoshone Councilman Wayland Large and former Northern Arapaho Councilman Lee Spoonhunter brought the issue up at the most recent UW Board of Trustees meeting on Sept. 26.
UW does not currently offer free tuition for students who are members of federally recognized tribes, but Large said it should, given that the university has roots in stolen Indigenous land and continues to receive funding from those lands in the form of state-trust lands.
“From my understanding, UW is a land grant institution and should be able to provide free tuition to Native Americans as a land grant institution. A lot of the land based colleges currently provide free tuition to federally recognized tribes,” he said.
The practice has gained traction at other universities in recent years, but it’s not the first time the issue has been brought up in regards to UW. According to Ellis, who co-chairs the Select Committee on Tribal Relations with Oakley, the conversation has been taking place for six years but has been going in circles.
“We’re kind of going back and forth about who is in charge of maybe coming up with a plan,” Ellis said to UW trustees. “As someone who’s been trying to dive into this, it’s very clear to me that we need the university's leadership and partnership on this, because you hold the information and you live in this space.”
The issue has been a central topic of conversation for the Select Committee this interim session. They’ve explored how many students would need support and where the funding could come from with representatives from both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.
The three main scholarships that currently support Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone students at the university are the Chief Washakie Memorial Endowment, the Northern Arapaho Endowment and the Northern Arapaho Sky People Endowment. But they, along with other scholarship opportunities, aren’t fully meeting students’ needs,
according to a study by UW law student Alyson White Eagle previously presented to the legislative committee.
The discussion lasted for more than an hour, with the dialogue centering around different types of endowments and who should be in the driver’s seat. But towards the end of the conversation, Ellis pushed the board to make a decision.
“We are ill-equipped to start in there in micromanaging the affairs of the university, diving into your endowments and seeing how they work and trying to restructure,” she said. “Can we just not keep kicking this down the road?”
Ultimately, UW President Ed Seidel said the group had “taken a very important conceptual step here today” and made a commitment to looking into the issue more fully.
“I’ll personally take the responsibility to work with you and our team to put together the right group and see what we can come up with,” he said.
While the specific path forward for tuition waivers is still unclear, Seidel presented some more specifics at the final interim Select Committee on Tribal Relations meeting in Fort Washakie on Oct. 2.
“We did some work with the Native American Cultural Center and have identified very specifically 20 Eastern Shoshone and 22 Northern Arapaho students, of which 29 are undergraduates,” he said.
That would cost about $320,000 per year in terms of tuition and fees, which would require a roughly $8 million endowment, according to Seidel.
He said that could happen by bringing together and developing the previously-mentioned main three endowments, although that could be complicated by the fact that they have specific donor requirements about how the money is used.
Alternatively, the university could create a separate endowment that could be used to supplement those already-existing sources of funding. They could cover, for example, the full cost of attendance for some students.
Either way, he said the University of Wyoming Foundation is in the process of designing a schoolwide fundraising plan.
“We've been gearing up for [a fundraising campaign] for a couple of years. So Native American scholarships are a part of what we would consider as part of a comprehensive campaign for the university,” he said.
Seidel shared that there have also been talks about working with Central Wyoming College to create a cohort model to support students from the Wind River Reservation, who would be advised and supported by staff from both institutions.
“We think this will improve transfer rates and we think it will improve student success for multiple reasons, one of which is that the students will know each other. They don't come individually, but they come with an already defined social network and support network,” he said.
Seidel said that the cohort program will roll out in “the next year or perhaps a little longer,” and shared that he is in the process of making a small tuition waiver working group with different stakeholders, including representatives from both the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.
