MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT
Dear Members of the Koç University Community,
It was almost 7 years ago, during the summer of 2010, when Mustafa Keskin walked into my office with his father... He was a student visually-impaired from birth who had just missed the full-scholarship threshold for placement at our Law School. Although his exam scores placed him among the top five thousand students in the country, this incredible achievement was still not enough to earn him a full scholarship at Koç University through the national placement system. With his family having only modest means and income, it was also obviously not possible for him to come to our university with half-scholarship.
Inspired by Mustafa and with the hopes of helping many more like him, we decided that something needed to be done to help high-potential students from low-income backgrounds realize their dream of studying at Koç University. Thus, the Anatolian Scholarship Program was born in 2011 with 14 students and 6 donors. What we do is to simply match successful students from economically disadvantaged families in the developing provinces of Turkey with corporate and individual donors. We identify and persuade donors to participate in the program, who in turn, provide two-thirds of the total expenses of the students during their education, while Koç University provides the remaining one third, matching the donations on a 2:1 basis.
Fast forward to 2016, we currently have 289 students studying at Koç University with 139 companies and individuals as our donors. Our donor base continues to expand and we receive nearly 3000 applications from all over the country every year.
We are especially happy to see that other universities in Turkey are adopting this need-based-scholarship model. Equal opportunity in access to high-quality education is essential for the development of our country. We believe that the more this model is replicated, the better we may realize the incredible potential that exists in our unusually young nation with an average age of 30!
I am very pleased to share with you that this year, we were able to support 87 additional new students who have now been placed at Koç University, under this program, with the help of 34 additional companies and individuals as our new donors. The turnout of this year gives us renewed hope that we can realize our target of 120 new students in 2018, and possibly even reach 150+ students, as we celebrate our 25th anniversary. For this purpose, we are launching a fundraising campaign, to raise support for 150+ additional Anatolian Scholarship students. Considering that it took us six years to raise funds for 289 students, raising for 150+ new students in a year is rather ambitious and aggressive, but all the more exciting and challenging.
We shall stage an intensive communications campaign in order to reach out to potential donors, alumni and friends of Koç University. As the first leg of this campaign, we have documented stories of 6 of our students via videos, which you can watch below. We shall continue to share more stories in social media and hope that many in our Koç University community can check these posts out and be a part of their story. At the same time, we are engaging our 12000+ alumni, urging them all to be part of our campaign, by raising support for 1 Anatolian Scholarship student per graduating class, hoping that all our graduating classes can thus muster enough support among themselves for 25 new bright-but-needy students in 2018!
On a related note, undergraduate placement results for 2017 were recently announced and our university has once again captured an outstanding student profile. Half (51%) of our new students are from the top 20000, 74% from the 50000 and 95% from the top 100000 in terms of rankings in the national placement exam (LYS). We also see pleasing results in student placements at all levels, including the top 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10000, 20000 and the top 50000 ranking categories. The fact that we realized these types of placement statistics in spite of significant modifications in our scholarship distributions and our quotas in some departments underscore the robust and long-lasting nature of our performance and profile. With 5% of our students coming from rankings below the top 100000, the bottom rankings for a few of our departments were lower than expected. Nevertheless, we are confident that we can remedy these outlying placements by fine-tuning of our quota and scholarship distributions in the coming years.
Koç University thus continues its leadership position among universities in our country by hosting the most successful student profile.
This achievement belongs to all of you and all of us as faculty, administrative personnel and students. I thank each and every one of you for your hard work and contributions.
May you all have a restful rest of August as it will go by quickly as usual. September and the start of the School Year is just around the corner; we are all excited about meeting our new cadre of students and moving on with our quest for excellence in education and scientific research.
My best wishes and regards to you all,
Umran Inan
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