PHOTO BY CHRIS MOONEY
BizEDUCATION
Kate Hoffman
PHOTO BY BRENT G. MATHIS
Founder & CEO Earn to Learn
Lee Lambert
Chancellor Pima Community College
Earn to Learn
Skill-Building Program Helps Students Financially Many college and tech school students get a “free ride” – paid tuition and other expenses – courtesy of having great grades, sports scholarships or wealthy parents. Others go into debt. Still others pay through a variety of resources – and that’s where an Arizona program comes in. That program, called Earn to Learn, offers an 8 to 1 match for students who qualify for a Pell Grant. The program will go national if the Earn to Learn Act, backed by Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, goes through. “You do your part, you’re going to be 114 BizTucson
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Summer 2021
successful. That’s an important aspect of the program,” said Pima Community College Chancellor Lee Lambert. “Ultimately you have to put in the effort.” Earn to Learn has been in place for nearly 10 years in Arizona. “Earn to Learn is a skills-building program. You’re learning the skills of financial management, which is so important to individuals. Also time management, which is so important,” Lambert said. “You’re also getting an incredible support system that goes along with it, so it’s much more than you making a $500 investment. It helps you in so many ways.” The program also includes one-on-
one coaching for students that includes personal finance training, college readiness training and ongoing support from the first day at the university all the way through graduation. “You learn things from working that you don’t learn in the classroom, and I think that sometimes that gets lost.” Lambert himself funded his upperlevel education using a combination of grants, work-study programs, working as a residents’ assistant, student loans and a U.S. Army program that matched what he contributed when he was a soldier. “That earning part is you having skin in the game. So I think that is, to a dewww.BizTucson.com
