NEWARK — Delaware officials are preparing to launch a pilot grant fund to entice students with STEM degrees to live and work in Delaware.
The
STEM Talent Advancement and Retention (STAR) Fund was established last year through the Fiscal Year 2025 grant-in-aid bill to offer some tuition reimbursement for Delaware graduates that have a full-time job in the fields of environmental or computer science, advanced mathematics or finance, or engineering or medical device technology.
The
Delaware Bioscience Association has long been a champion of the idea of a tuition reimbursement program, as the trade association joined with
members of the Delaware Life Science Caucus to lobby to establish the fund. In the end, it was allocated $100,000 on a one-time basis to gauge the interest.
Delaware Bioscience Association Associate Director Katie Lakofsky, who focuses on workforce development, said that as the biotech sector continues to develop in Delaware, there’s a high interest in keeping new talent here after they graduate from the University of Delaware or Delaware State University.
“If you look at the statistics of our students who come here and stay after graduation, we need to be creative in finding a way to incentivize students to stay in our state,” she said. She also pointed out that 42% of the 60,000 Delaware college students are from other states and the average student debt a Delaware college graduate carries is $37,000.
“They chose Delaware for undergraduate [studies]. Hopefully, we can get them to stay here long-term,” Lakofsky added.
The STAR Fund will ideally issue awards for 20 applicants at most. Applicants must hold a degree from a secondary institution and work full time in a STEM field, though preference will be given to applicants who are Delawareans or who graduated from a Delaware college.
The maximum award for an associate’s degree is $1,000; a bachelor’s degree is up to $4,000 and a master’s degree is up to $6,000. Award recipients must also provide documentation of student loans or other expenses related to education six months after the award.
“Employers are pretty excited about this opportunity because it can be used as part of a recruitment strategy,” Lakofsky said. “We’re also making sure the college career centers know about this program as well when they’re talking with students to help encourage them to look into it.”
The STAR Fund is set to open for applications on July 15.
