Clago Family Endowed Scholarship

Was it a guilty conscience or a fine-tuned sense of integrity—or a little of both—that finally motivated a former student to pay her old education debt to the University? That answer may remain unknown, but it is part of the story of this unusual scholarship.

In 1980 Allison Clago enrolled as a freshman at California Lutheran College, and she thought she had her future all figured out. She declared political science as her major and economics as her minor, doing well in her academic work. But at the end of her junior year she found herself without funds for her senior year. Worse yet, she had a $3,000 unpaid debt with the CLU business office. So, she withdrew from school.

Even without her degree Allison found a good position with a brokerage firm in Beverly Hills. She liked her work and found she was well suited to the field of investments and securities. She advanced regularly to increasingly responsible positions. But something kept nagging at her—that unpaid debt back at Cal Lutheran. For a time she received reminder notices that arrived in her family’s mailbox. Occasionally the business office would phone, but she managed to avoid taking those calls. Eventually both the notices and calls stopped.

Exactly what finally prompted Allison to action is not known, but act she did. In December 1993, she called CLC and asked for information that would allow her to pay her debt. Besides paying off the debt, she wanted to make a sizable gift to set up a small scholarship for a student hoping to go into investments. By this time, records of Allison’s old debt were buried deep in the business office files, but CLC staff finally found them. With her check for $3,000 Allison enclosed a note that read, “This is with my gratitude for the fine-tuned education that gave me the foundation for success.” It was a wonderful acknowledgment of CLU’s success in providing a quality education.

The story doesn’t end there. Allison became so caught up in the idea of giving back that she quickly built her scholarship to endowment level with her year-end gifts, making the Clago Family Endowed Scholarship one of the healthiest scholarships for good students majoring in economics, preferably those seeking careers in securities and investments.