To celebrate the one-year anniversary of her album Lemonade, Beyoncé announced the establishment of the Formation Scholars Scholarship Program for the 2017-2018 academic year.

Formation Scholars is named after the track Formation, the only single released prior to the release of Lemonade, which also recently won a Peabody Award for entertainment.

The announcement on the artist’s website states that the purpose of the scholarships is “to encourage and support young women who are unafraid to think outside the box and are bold, creative, conscious, and confident.”

Four scholarships will be awarded, one per college, to “female incoming, current or graduate students pursuing studies in creative arts, music, literature or African-American studies.” Four, the number of scholarships Beyoncé chose to award, is an important number to her symbolically. The artist was born on the fourth of September and married her husband, Jay Z, on April 4th. She also released an album titled 4.

The schools that were chosen to participate in the program are Berklee College of Music, Howard University, Parsons School of Design, and Spelman College. Howard University and Spelman College are both historically black universities, while Berklee and Parsons are schools geared towards students pursuing the arts.

Though the amount of tuition that the scholarship covers has yet to be released, the Berklee website describes it as a one-time $25,000 scholarship. Berklee’s President, Roger H. Brown, spoke of the school’s appreciation and of the good that the scholarships will do. “We at Berklee love Beyoncé,” he said. “Her original all-female band included a current professor and two Berklee alumnae. Beyoncé’s support for a female student studying at the Boston or Valencia campus will have an impact on the global music industry, and further Beyoncé’s own mission of artistic excellence and innovative business practices that have made her the most compelling artist of the 21st century.”

The school recently celebrated the 10-year anniversary of Beyoncé’s original all-female band at the Berklee Performance Center.

also gave Beyoncé praise, tweeting her appreciation for the scholarship by thanking Beyoncé for “investing in our girls” and being a “role model for us all.”

Based on information from the Berklee University website, the scholarship requires a cumulative GPA of at least 3.5, evidence of work in the field of study, and a short essay describing how Lemonade “inspired your educational goals.”

For many, the $25,000 will be inspiring enough.

Featured Image by abbieabc on Flickr

Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Sign Up For Our Newsletter