Millennium Scholarship has helped nearly 200K Nevadans with college. Its future is cloudy.
June 20, 2025 By
Noticiero Movil
State treasurer says “dramatic adjustments” are needed to ensure sustainability for the scholarship program that helps thousands of Nevada students.
Nevada State Treasurer Zach Conine said “dramatic adjustments” will need to be made next legislative session for the Millennium Scholarship to survive.
The Nevada Governor Guinn Millennium Scholarship, named after Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn who signed it into law in 1999, has been funding Nevada college students for nearly three decades. More than 177,000 students to date have used the scholarship, which is based on test scores and GPAs and offers students $10,000.
But the funding for the award — based on dwindling revenue from the sale of tobacco products — is becoming increasingly unstable as each year goes by.
“We either need to keep putting in new money [from the] general fund appropriations, or you need to decrease the amount of money the Millennium Scholarship costs,” Conine said. “That’s going to be a legislative decision.”
According to Conine, the Millennium Scholarship wasn’t looked at this legislative session because during the last session, $75 million from the general fund was allocated to maintain the scholarship for the next four years.
Asked about the scholarship in the final weeks of the recently completed session, Ways and Means Committee Chair Daniele Monroe-Moreno (D-North Las Vegas) said, “My focus, and I think everyone’s focus, is getting out of this session, making sure we don’t have a structural deficit.”
However, by the time 2027 hits, the Millennium Scholarship will not have enough money to cover all eligible students.
The $10,000 scholarships, split over a four-year period ranging from $960 to $1,200 per semester, are awarded each year to several thousand qualifying Nevada high school graduates who are attending an in-state college or university.
Sen. Fabian Doñate (D-Las Vegas) is among those putting thought into how to fund the program — including floating the idea of opening it up to private contributions.
“Governor Guinn, while he was on the opposite political side of me, he had this vision that if kids stayed in school and they went through a good education that the state would take care of them as they’re going through that journey,” Doñate said. “That’s something that all of us should be fighting for, right? Regardless of who we are, where we come from and what our political beliefs are.”
Read the rest of this article, which was shared with Noticiero Móvil, over at The Nevada Independent. This story was reported by Lizzie Ramirez and originally published on June 8, 2025.
