Ring Scholarship Expands Access Through Varied Outreach

At the end of May, ASCP closed the application window for its second year of the Dr. Alvin Ring Empowerment Scholarship for Laboratory Professionals, established to provide financial aid to students from medically underserved and/or rural areas who are pursuing higher education in the medical laboratory sciences. This scholarship is unique in that it provides scholarship support to a wide range of applicants—from high school seniors interested in starting their education in medical laboratory science to in-service laboratory professionals looking for career advancement through higher education.   

In the first year of the scholarship’s administration, 14 scholarships were awarded to students across the U.S. in NAACLS-accredited HTL (2), MLT (4), and MLS (8) programs. Despite outreach efforts, no high school student applications were received in this initial cohort of 73 eligible applicants. As a part of process improvement strategies to recruit this new target audience, ASCP, in its second year of scholarship engagement, deployed a number of additional outreach strategies to reach high school students interested in this financial aid opportunity.   

Some of these strategies included: 1) in-person and virtual engagement with high school science teachers (e.g., ASCP staff engagement at the National Science Teaching Association Conference 2025) and school counselors (advertisements through the American School Counselors Association’s website and e-Newsletter channels); 2) promotion on free, public-facing scholarship websites (i.e., Fastweb, Scholarships.com, Peterson’s); and 3) development of bilingual (English and Spanish) flyers distributed electronically via the ASCP Online Community pages and at ASCP KnowledgeLab 2025. Using this improved outreach strategy, 116 eligible applications were received—a 55 percent increase over 2024.   

Although active MLS students (not yet in the laboratory workforce) represented the largest group of applicants (41 percent), applications from 10 eligible high school students were received, representing 9 percent of the eligible applicant pool. This is a significant improvement in recruitment strategies for this specific target audience; ASCP intends to continue to learn and adapt outreach strategies to expand this applicant cohort in future years.