Union University Scholarships (2026–2027)

📅 2027–2028 Planning Note: The costs below reflect the most recently published figures (2026–2027). Universities typically finalize the next year’s rates in the spring, and we’ll update this page once official 2027–2028 numbers are released.

Planning tip: At large public universities, tuition, fees, and housing usually increase modestly each year (often in the 2–5% range). For early budgeting, families may want to plan for roughly $1,000–$1,500 more in-state or $2,000–$3,000 more out-of-state in total direct costs once new rates are published.

Average Federal Net Price: $28,533 — this is what families actually paid after grants and scholarships (no loans), based on the most recent federal data. Your specific cost could be significantly lower or higher depending on your financial aid eligibility and merit scholarships. New to Net Price & SAI? Read our guide.

📌 Regional Tuition & Waiver Options

Union’s Tuition page shows Heritage housing plus the 140-meal plan, which comes to $13,940 a year and a total bill of about $56,630. Union’s Cost of Attendance page shows the Quads Apartments plus the 285-meal plan, which comes to $17,436 a year and a total of about $60,126. Both numbers are real and both are on Union’s website right now.

The figures in our table above use the higher Cost of Attendance version, because that is the number Union’s financial aid office uses to calculate eligibility. But the practical takeaway is better than that sounds: your dorm choice and meal plan are worth roughly $3,500 a year, or about $14,000 across four years. Ask your enrollment counselor to price your student’s actual housing preference before you accept any number as final.

Union is private, so tuition is identical whether you live in Jackson or Juneau. There is no residency discount to chase and no reciprocity agreement to apply for. The one exception is for college employees: if either parent works at an institution in the Tuition Exchange network, the International Association of Baptist Colleges and Universities, or the International Alliance for Christian Education, your student may be eligible for a tuition waiver. Those deadlines are early and easy to miss, so see the Hidden Gems section below.

📅 Union Scholarship Timeline (Simple Version)

• Junior year spring through senior fall: Take the ACT, SAT, or CLT. Everything downstream depends on the score being in Union’s hands.
• October 1, 2026: Scholars of Excellence application opens. Invitations go out by email once your admission file and scores are processed.
• Friday, January 1, 2027: Scholars of Excellence application and essay due. This is a hard stop.
• Early January (confirm by phone): Kalos Scholarship application has historically closed here. Union’s Kalos page is currently down, so call 800-33UNION.
• February 2027: Scholars of Excellence competition weekends on campus.
• March 31, 2027: Honors Community application priority deadline.
• Rolling all year: Automatic merit. There is no deadline, which is exactly why families get lazy about the ones above.

Parent rule of thumb: Union’s automatic money will wait for you. The big money will not.

1. The on-campus versus off-campus split. Every freshman tier above pays $3,000 to $4,000 less if your student commutes. That is not a footnote, it is the difference between the Dean’s tier and the Provost’s tier.
2. President’s and Trustees’ pay identically. Both are $17,000 on campus, $13,000 off. The 29 ACT is not worth more money by itself. It is worth an invitation to Scholars of Excellence, and that is where the full ride lives.

One student a year wins the Founders’ Scholarship. But every invited student who shows up to the competition weekend receives an award. The weekend determines how much, not whether. Union will even pair your student with a student host for on-campus housing, so the visit costs you travel and not much else. If the invitation arrives, go.

❓ Flagship / Competitive Scholarship FAQs

When is the Scholars of Excellence deadline?
The application opens October 1, 2026 and closes Friday, January 1, 2027 for students entering in Fall 2027. Union encourages early submission because space at the weekends is limited. Since the invitation only arrives after your admission file and test scores are processed, work backward: testing needs to be finished in the fall, not January.

How do we apply?
You do not, directly. Submit the Union undergraduate application and get scores in. If your student meets the criteria, an invitation email arrives. From there, log in to UU Bound, click the Scholars of Excellence link, upload the essay as a PDF or Word file, and submit. Then attend one of the February 2027 weekends on campus.

What does Union actually weigh?
Union states plainly that the selection committee places emphasis on the essay. The prompt asks students to show their fit for a faith-filled academic community. Weekend activities include a “Hot Topic” discussion, and your enrollment counselor sends the roughly five discussion items in November, so there is time to prepare.

What does the Founders’ Scholarship cover?
Tuition, room, meals, and student services fees for fall and spring terms, up to eight undergraduate semesters. One recipient per year. Winners are also admitted automatically to Union’s Honors Community. To keep it, students maintain a 3.25 cumulative Union GPA and perform up to 50 hours of leadership service per semester. That last requirement is real work, not a formality.

When do we find out?
Award letters to all applicants go out in March.

Is Union a Stamps or QuestBridge partner?
No to both. And Union has no dedicated National Merit package, though National Merit status does qualify a student for the Scholars of Excellence competition.

Our student is a 28 ACT and misses the cutoff. Anything else?
Yes, and it may be bigger. The Kalos Scholarship requires only a 28 ACT (or 1320 SAT, or 92 CLT) with a 3.75 GPA, and for humanities majors it functions as a full ride. See the Hidden Gems section below, because it is genuinely the most overlooked award Union offers.

🧠 Parent Strategy: Union’s “Raise Your Hand” Problem

Most of the awards below require no application at all. What they require is that you mention something. A grandparent who went to Union. A parent on church staff. A summer at Centrifuge. A TeenPact certificate in a drawer. Union does not go looking for these connections, and there is no form that asks about all of them at once.

1. Before you fill out the admission application, sit down as a family and inventory: church membership, ministry employment, alumni relatives, Christian youth programs, gap year programs, speech and debate.
2. Flag every single one on the admission application itself.
3. Email your enrollment counselor a short list of what you flagged, and ask them to confirm each award in writing.
4. When the award letter arrives, check it against your list. Missing items happen.

Kalos is a “last dollar” award for incoming freshmen majoring in English, history, languages, political science, theology, or philosophy. Union calculates all your other aid first, then Kalos fills the entire remaining gap. For students entering Fall 2026 or later that means tuition, fees, housing, and meals. In practice, a full ride.

The requirements are a 3.75 unweighted GPA plus a 28 ACT, 1320 SAT, or 92 CLT, and two references: one pastoral, one from an honors or AP humanities teacher. Notice that the test floor is one point below the Scholars of Excellence cutoff. There is a real group of strong humanities students who can win everything through Kalos and never get an SOE invitation.

Heads up: Union’s dedicated Kalos page broke during their website redesign and now redirects to the general financial aid page. The application has historically closed in early January with notification by April 1, but call 800-33UNION or email finaid@uu.edu to confirm this cycle’s deadline. A broken web page is not a reason to skip the best award on this list.

❓ Hidden Gems FAQ

Which of these actually stack, and which replace my merit award?
Union sorts them into groups. The three “stackable” awards (Alumni Legacy, Ministry Dependent, TBC/SBC) add to your merit but share a combined $2,000 annual cap. Partnership awards like TeenPact, Young Life, Centrifuge, and IMPACT 360 generally add. The IMB/NAMB award, Phi Theta Kappa transfer award, and most endowed scholarships replace your merit money. NITOC and the endowed awards are explicitly flagged by Union as “could be” replacements, so get your specific case in writing.

My parent works at a college. Is that worth anything?
Potentially more than everything else on this page combined. Union participates in three employee-dependent waiver networks: Tuition Exchange, the International Association of Baptist Colleges and Universities, and the International Alliance for Christian Education. A waiver covers the semester bundled tuition rate outright. Start with your parent’s HR office, then contact Union’s liaison, Dr. Dan Griffin, at dgriffin@uu.edu. Applications are due October 1 of the preceding year if your parent works elsewhere, December 1 if the other direction. Fall entry only, seats are limited, and Union chooses when demand exceeds space. Also read the trade-off: waiver recipients receive no other Union institutional aid without an exception approved by the financial aid director.

My parents serve with the IMB or NAMB. What changes?
A lot. The INAMB Scholarship is worth half of tuition every year, roughly $21,000, and no merit tier comes close. It replaces your merit award rather than adding to it, so do the subtraction, but for nearly every student it is a large net gain. Self-identify on the admission application and email documentation of employment to admissions@uu.edu. Missionaries serving outside the SBC agencies fall under the Ministry Dependent Award instead, which is much smaller.

My church might have a scholarship at Union. How do I find out?
Ask your church office directly. Individual Southern Baptist congregations have funded named scholarships at Union, each with its own amount, criteria, and deadline, and the church selects the recipient, not Union. The pool competing for any one church’s fund is often just a handful of graduating seniors, which makes the odds far better than the amounts suggest. One practical problem: Union’s link to the list of participating churches broke in the website migration and no longer resolves, so calling your church secretary is currently the only way to check. Church committees often decide in spring, so ask early.

My student plays music, debates, or competes athletically. Where is that money?
Not with the financial aid office. Departments and organizations administer their own talent awards on their own timelines: music through auditions, debate through forensics, publications through their advisors, athletics through coaches. There is no master list. Email the relevant department chair in the fall of senior year and ask directly, because a music department cannot offer money to a student it has never heard play. One caution for athletes: Union limits how much additional gift aid an athlete can keep, so athletic money often does not add cleanly to academic money. Get the combined number in writing.

Is the West Tennessee Heritage Grant worth changing plans over?
No. It is $1,500 a year for students from 21 named West Tennessee counties, and it requires living on campus. Since Union charges roughly $17,000 a year for housing and meals, $1,500 does not come close to justifying a move into the dorms. If your student was going to live on campus anyway, take it. If you were planning to commute from Jackson or Memphis, this is not a reason to change that.

Several of these links on Union’s site are broken. Is that a problem?
It reflects a recent website redesign, not a discontinued program. As of August 2026, Union’s dedicated pages for Kalos, the School of Theology and Missions scholarship, and the church endowed scholarship listing all redirect to generic landing pages. The awards still exist and are still described on Union’s main scholarships page. Call 800-33UNION rather than assuming an award is gone because the link is dead.

At a lot of universities, getting into honors unlocks a separate pot of money. That is not how Union works. The Honors Community carries no dedicated scholarship fund of its own. The relationship runs the other direction: winning Union’s biggest scholarships gets you into Honors automatically, rather than Honors getting you the scholarship.

• Small, seminar-style courses taught through discussion rather than lecture, in a cohort that moves through them together.
• Faculty access early. New students have lunch with the Honors directors and get advised by an Honors professor before classes start.
• Travel built into the curriculum. The Beauty course travels each spring to a major American city for art and architecture at minimal student cost, and the Justice course visits the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.
• A transcript credential. University Honors on the diploma matters for graduate school and competitive fellowships.

This is not a ranking claim, it is a money claim. Union’s Kalos Scholarship is restricted to students majoring in English, history, languages, political science, theology, or philosophy, and for those students it functions as a full ride covering tuition, fees, housing, and meals. Most high-scoring applicants self-select into pre-med, nursing, and business, which means the pool competing for Kalos is genuinely small.

If your student is torn between a humanities major and something more obviously vocational, the math at Union is unusual: choosing English or history could be worth tens of thousands of dollars a year. That is the opposite of how this decision usually goes, and it is worth a conversation before your student commits to a major on the application.

As of August 2026, Union’s dedicated pages for the Kalos Scholarship, the School of Theology and Missions Scholarship, and the list of participating church endowed scholarships all redirect to generic landing pages rather than the intended content. The awards themselves are still active and still described on Union’s main scholarships page. For any of the three, call Student Financial Aid at 800-33UNION or email finaid@uu.edu.

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