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COLLEGIATE LICENSE PLATES
NOW AVAILABLE
By SECRETARY OF STATE GEORGE H. RYAN
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By the end of this month, Illinois passenger car
and B-truck owners with new "collegiate" license plates
will be cruising all over college campuses and towns.
The drivers not only will be fans of college teams, but
will be making significant and annual contributions to
student scholarships and higher education in general.
"Collegiate" plates unveiled last month honoring
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are the
first in this special series. The plates feature a blue and
orange block "I" and the words "Fighting Illini" to the
left of the registration numbers. On the deadline for
this issue of the Illinois Municipal Review, the following
plates also had been unveiled:
• The Loyola University of Chicago plate, featuring the maroon school crest logo,
• The Illinois State University plate, featuring the
red and black ISU Redbirds logo,
• The Southern Illinois University plate, featuring the circular maroon SIU logo,
• The University of Illinois at Springfield plate,
featuring the blue UIS "Capitol dome" logo,
• The Eastern Illinois University plate, featuring
the silver and blue EIU Panther logo, and
• The Western Illinois University plate, featuring
the purple and gold WIU logo.
The initial purchase price of new collegiate plates
is $88, $40 higher than the standard fee for Illinois license plates. Of that extra fee, $25 will be deposited
automatically into the State University Trust Fund for
a public university or the University Grant Fund for a
private not-for-profit university.
The annual renewal fee for these plates will be
$75. Again, $25 from that fee will go into the appropriate scholarship fund.
The collegiate plate program is being introduced
at a time when the cost of attending college is rising,
but the amount of scholarship money available to students is not keeping pace.
According to the U.S. Department of Education,
in 1979 the cost of sending one child to a public university for a year - tuition and room and board - consumed an average of 9 percent of a family's income. In
the last few years, the one-year cost of a public university has risen to 14 percent of a typical family's income.
In Illinois, the average cost of tuition at a public
college, at $3,400, is 20 percent higher than the national average.
State support for scholarships, however, has not
risen as fast. Because of competing spending pressures
from other parts of the state budget, allocations for
the major state scholarship program, the Illinois
Monetary Awards, has remained relatively constant at
around $100 million since 1990.
This amount has increased slightly in the last few
years, but there still is not enough scholarship money
to help all students who need it to get into college and
stay in school.
Under the Collegiate License Plate program, 166
institutions of higher education in Illinois - both public and private - are eligible to take part.
In addition to the schools with plates already unveiled, nine schools have signed up for the program:
Augustana College, Bradley University, Concordia
University, DePaul University, Malcolm X College,
Millikin University, Northern Illinois University,
Northwestern University and U of I-Chicago. Signs of
those plates will be unveiled at a later date.
Any Illinois resident can apply for collegiate
plates. I urge interested motorists to join me in giving
it "the old college try." Support the university of your
choice by putting a set of collegiate plates on your passenger car or B-truck.
It is a great way to let people know you are part of
the team. And it is a great way to support one of the
nation's finest systems of higher education.
Anyone with questions about the Collegiate
License Plate program may call the Secretary of State's
office toll free at 1-800-252-8980. The complete list of
"Collegiate" plates is available in seconds by clicking
the "Motorist Services" area on the Secretary of State's
World Wide Web site, the "Illinois Gateway." This
leads to "A Guide to Illinois License Plates" where motorists also can find directions on how to apply for
"Collegiate" plates and an on-line request form.
The Gateway's address is http:\\www.sos.state.
il.us. •
November 1996 / Illinois Municipal Review / Page 7
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