Sharing the gift of education

By Weldon Johnson

Education has long been a guiding principle in Nancy Burnett’s family and in hoping to pass that gift along to others, she set up the Burke-Burnett Endowed Scholarship.

The scholarship will provide support for students enrolled at the College of Health Solutions with a focus on movement science and human performance.

“Our family believes in education,” Burnett said. “I just decided the best thing I could do with my estate was to provide funds for students.”

A third-generation Arizonan, members of Burnett’s family attended colleges and universities throughout the southwest, including the three public universities in Arizona. Her mother and brother “ended up at that other school” (the University of Arizona), Burnett said with a chuckle.

Her grandmother, Elizabeth Ross, earned a teacher’s certificate in 1916 from the Normal School in Flagstaff (now Northern Arizona University), while a great aunt earned a library science degree from the University of California—Berkeley and another great aunt earned a degree in the history of Hispanic America from UCLA and a master’s degree from Occidental University.

Burnett enrolled in ASU’s business school fresh out of high school in the late 1960s, which led to a career as what she described as “one of the original computer nerds.” Twenty years of sitting at a desk in front of a screen led her to an interest in exercise and fitness so she enrolled in ASU’s movement science program where she earned her second degree.

Her collegiate journey started while the country was still engaged in the Vietnam War and she decided to re-enter college for the second time after celebrating her 40th birthday. She was impressed with the growth ASU experienced in between those two terms as a student and further impressed with the progress that has come since then.

“When I decided to get the second degree the school had grown a lot,” Burnett said. “They offered a degree I was interested in, so I became a freshman again at age 40. I’m more impressed with the way its grown since then, especially in the last 20 years or so.”

The College of Health Solutions is one of those developments that has made an impression on Burnett.

“When I first set up my estate there was no College of Health Solutions,” Burnett said. “I just made kind of a general donation for exercise science. So when I found out there was this college, which surprised me, I was really happy to be more specific and establish an actual scholarship.”

Another reason she endowed the scholarship was to help with another aspect of attending college: the cost. She said when she started college the first time, tuition was about $20 per credit hour.

“You could work and go to school and the cost wasn’t a big deal,” Burnett said. “Books were more expensive than the credits. Now it’s just an extraordinary cost to go to school anywhere and people need help. I thought a scholarship fund would be a good thing to do with the estate. It’s part of our family heritage to get educated.”