The next four years will be spent studying at his top-choice college and a year in England, and all of it will be paid for.
Whiteland Community High School graduate Anthony Simpson was one of 700 students who received a full-ride scholarship through QuestBridge, a nonprofit organization that provides scholarships to underprivileged students. The program specifically matches students with high GPAs and test scores with Ivy League-level schools throughout the nation. Simpson also received the National Achievement Scholarship, which is awarded to high-performing black students.
Without the scholarship, he most likely would not have gone to any of his other choices, like Yale University or Massachusetts Institute of Technology, since he comes from a low-income family, Simpson said.
Anthony Simpson worked on his own to find scholarships for his college tuition, his mother, Angela Simpson, said. They had never sat her son down to talk about how they would have paid for college otherwise.
“Without that, it would have been bad,” Angela Simpson said. “I don’t know how we would have paid for that, but we would have gotten him somewhere.”
Starting last fall, Simpson worked through multiple applications and essays.
He had to rank his top eight schools, starting with Williams College in Massachusetts and including MIT, Yale and Stanford University.
Through QuestBridge, Simpson’s application is sent to his top choices, and each school has to accept his application individually. If his application was not accepted at Williams, they would see if MIT accepted him, for example.
But Simpson’s top choice accepted his application and offered him a full-ride scholarship, covering three years of tuition and room and board, totaling more than $150,000.
The scholarship also covers one year at Oxford University in England for his junior year of college. He will participate in the study abroad program, specializing in one of his majors: computer science and mathematics.
“When the person that called me from QuestBridge told me I was matched, and I just said, ‘Oh my god, thank you,’” Simpson said. “That’s all I could say — ‘Oh my god, thank you.’”
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”The Simpson File” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
Name: Anthony Simpson
High school: Whiteland Community
College: Williams College
Major: Computer science and mathematics
Scholarship: QuestBridge, National Achievement Scholarship Program
[sc:pullout-text-end]
