Celebrating Lemonade, Beyoncé Creates the Formation Scholar Award
By Maya Gold
On Lemonade’s one-year anniversary, Beyoncé shows what it means to be #beygood.
How do most musical artists who aren’t Beyoncé celebrate the one-year anniversary of their platinum, third-highest-selling album in 2016, second-most prominently ranked album of 2016?
I’m honestly asking. To spitball, I imagine it involves high-end champagne, renting out an entire club, and more high-end champagne.
And maybe Beyoncé did all those things! But she also did something even cooler. To quote her website:
"To add to the celebration of the one-year anniversary of LEMONADE, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter announces the establishment of Formation Scholars awards for the 2017-2018 academic year, to encourage and support young women who are unafraid to think outside the box and are bold, creative, conscious and confident.Four scholarships will be awarded, one per college, to female incoming, current or graduate students pursuing studies in creative arts, music, literature or African-American studies."
If you were curious, the four colleges are:
- The prestigious HBCU (historically Black college/university) Howard University in Washington, D.C.
- Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, the largest independent college for contemporary music on the planet.
- Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, America’s oldest private, liberal arts, HBCU college for women.
- Parsons School of Design in New York City, ranked the number-one art and design school in the United States.
Basically, Beyoncé is not messing around when it comes to choosing the universities for her scholarship. Two are some of the best HBCUs in the country, and the other two are some of the best arts schools in the country.
Beyoncé is not messing around when it comes to choosing the universities for her scholarship.
However, the initial press release doesn’t mention how large the scholarships are. If Bey springs for full tuition, that’s quite a chunk of change. Parsons, for example, is one of the most expensive schools in the country. Its tuition costs $46,036 a year, but its overall cost of attendance is over $67,000. Howard University is the least expensive of the four, but still packs a punch. It charges nearly $24,000 a year for tuition, and the total cost of attendance is $43,116.
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Basically, she continues to surprise and awe us everyday and we wouldn’t have it any other way.