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A$AP Rocky will pay four years of tuition for one first-time freshman at LIU’s Roc Nation School, with applications open through December 15 for the Fall 2027 class.
The application link is short enough to fit on a flyer: apply.liu.edu/rn. Behind it sits a single seat, and on October 6 A$AP Rocky put his name on it. The Harlem-born rapper announced that he will fund four years of full tuition for one student at the Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment at Long Island University, with the award going to a first-time freshman who enrolls in Fall 2027. Rocky, who never went to college himself, is now paying for someone else’s degree.
Signal. What happened: A$AP Rocky announced a four-year, full-tuition scholarship for one student at the Roc Nation School of Music, Sports & Entertainment at Long Island University (LIU) in Brooklyn. Exact object: a single award covering four years of tuition for a first-time freshman, packaged in the school’s own announcement with one-on-one mentorship, access to the school’s professional Dolby Atmos studio, and Dean’s Scholar status; no dollar value, housing or fee coverage was stated. When and where: announced October 6, 2026; applications are open now through December 15, 2026 at apply.liu.edu/rn, for enrollment in Fall 2027 at the school’s Brooklyn campus. Source: Long Island University’s October 6 press release and Roc Nation’s matching announcement. Why it matters: it adds a full-tuition place for the 2027 class on top of the Hope Scholarships that already cover 25 percent of enrolled students, and it extends a run of celebrity-named scholarships at a school that is only five years into enrolling students.
The school’s own announcement of the award lists four pieces: full tuition, one-on-one mentorship from music industry professionals, access to the school’s professional Dolby Atmos studio, and Dean’s Scholar status, which brings automatic enrollment in an exclusive academic and mentorship program. Tuition is the headline, but the other three are what make the award read less like a check and more like an apprenticeship. The Dean’s Scholars Program, as Young Guru’s own scholarship announcement describes it, offers professional mentorship, networking opportunities and career development programming.
Billboard listed tuition at $32,000 as of 2024. If that is an annual rate, four years would come to more than $128,000 before any increases, though the announcement itself states no dollar value.
In the announcement, Rocky framed the award around opportunity. He said he believes in “creating your own lane” and in giving other people the chance to do the same. He pointed to the number of young people with talent and drive who need someone to back them, and said this award exists to help one of them make a plan concrete.
The announcement places the award inside a pattern. Roc Nation’s release describes the award as the latest in a widening run of backing from artists, athletes and industry leaders for the school’s students, and the sponsor list it names, which runs from a record executive to a professional basketball player to an engineer who also runs a program, shows how wide that circle has grown.
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Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, a company the 22-time Grammy winner launched in 2008, announced the school with Long Island University in August 2020, with enrollment set to begin in Fall 2021. The money was specific from the start: 25 percent of each incoming freshman class would receive Roc Nation Hope Scholarships and graduate without debt, and the first degrees on offer covered music, music technology, entrepreneurship and production, and sports management. Roc Nation CEO Desiree Perez called the partnership an investment in young people in Brooklyn and beyond, and the school sits in Brooklyn, the hometown of Shawn “JAY-Z” Carter. Perez added that the school would give students insight and experience and introduce the world to the next generation of talent.
The 2020 plan reached beyond the degree programs. Starting in spring 2021, the school was to run summer residential camps for high schoolers and Saturday programs for students ages 10 to 18 focused on music and sports management, with scholarships for participants, and Hope Scholars were promised individual support and mentorship on top of the funding. LIU President Kimberly Cline pitched the Brooklyn location as proximity to the center of New York’s music and sports worlds, a setting that offers students experiential learning and access to professional opportunities.
Hope Scholars are chosen from New York-based first-time freshmen who pair strong academics with the greatest financial need. Rocky’s award is separate from that pool: the coverage around it describes it as another full-tuition place for a student entering in 2027, not a replacement for the Hope program. With 25 percent of enrolled students on four-year full-tuition Hope Scholarships and a campus of about 300 students, that implies roughly 75 Hope Scholars at any time, which is the base the named awards sit on top of.
Five years after its first enrollment, the school is a working operation with a track record. It counts about 300 students on the Brooklyn campus across six bachelor of arts programs, three of them in music: applied music, vocal performance, and music technology, entrepreneurship and production. About 99 percent of students receive some form of financial aid. The faculty mixes university professors with adjunct industry leaders and special guest lecturers, and the curriculum is built to connect classroom work to internships and professional networks. The school prepares students for careers across entrepreneurship, music, sports business, management and performance, and it describes itself as pairing education with career development, culture initiatives and philanthropy.
The academic reputation arrived early. A Billboard ranking from the year before put the school on an international list of music business programs alongside Berklee College of Music, the Abbey Road Institute, UCLA, USC and NYU, and by then it had lined up partnerships with Wieden+Kennedy, Condé Nast, VFiles and JPMorgan Chase. In May 2025 the school celebrated its first graduating class.
Outside recognition has followed. Billboard named the school to its 2025 list of Top Music Business Schools, the second year in a row, and singled out a Music Entrepreneurship course in which students develop business proposals, pitch them to decision-makers and launch ventures. Leadership comes from inside the industry: Grammy-winning engineer and producer Young Guru directs the Music Technology, Entrepreneurship & Production program, and Tressa Cunningham serves as dean.
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Studio access is the line item that separates this scholarship from a plain tuition waiver. The school opened its Dolby Atmos studio on September 19, 2024, after more than a year of construction, and the space runs to roughly 2,400 square feet: four isolation booths for live band recording, a large tracking room and a 750-square-foot control room. It was designed by Walters-Storyk Design Group and integrated by Pro Audio Design, whose president previously designed Baseline Studios, the room where JAY-Z recorded many times. Young Guru, who directs the music technology program, had the studio modeled on that famed space.
The studio is an academic asset as well as a showpiece. The school became the first program in Brooklyn to offer a fully integrated Dolby Atmos music curriculum, built in partnership with the Dolby Institute, and the facility ranks among the largest professional Dolby Atmos music studios in New York. The setup is a 9.1.4 Atmos configuration, which its integrator characterized as the most powerful and detailed version of that layout. In Atmos shorthand, 9.1.4 means nine ear-level speaker channels, one subwoofer channel and four overhead channels. Faculty use the room to teach recording, mixing and production in the format, and the school runs a masterclass series there in which industry figures walk students through the process. Dolby Laboratories’ head of music industry relations, Christine Thomas, described the arrangement as a partnership that combines Young Guru’s expertise, Roc Nation’s industry leadership and LIU’s programs to shape the future of music production.
At the opening, Dean Cunningham said the new studio would strengthen the curriculum and serve the school’s ambitious students, and Young Guru said it placed the school at the forefront of music education. For the student who takes Rocky’s seat, that room is the practical payoff: the scholarship’s studio-access component points directly at it.
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Rocky joins a line of famous names who have each put one seat on the school’s roster. DJ Khaled, Megan Thee Stallion and LaMelo Ball were already attached to scholarships when Khaled announced his own full, four-year award in February 2023, and Young Guru, the school’s own program director, sits on the list as well. Several sponsors have Roc Nation ties of their own: the company’s 2020 launch coverage named DJ Khaled and Megan Thee Stallion among the artists it has worked with. At that point Megan Thee Stallion was a three-time Grammy winner and Ball was the 2021 NBA Rookie of the Year with the Charlotte Hornets; the school now describes Ball as an NBA All-Star.
Khaled’s application window opened at 3 p.m. on February 9, 2023, through the same apply.liu.edu/rn link Rocky’s award uses, and ran to April 15 for a student starting that fall, about nine weeks in all. His application included a prompt asking applicants how the scholarship would help them be the best version of themselves. Guru’s most recent award, announced June 30, 2026 for the Fall 2026 class, adds a hands-on layer: its recipient shadows him through the academic year and works one-on-one with him in the school’s Dolby Atmos-enabled professional studio. He had previously funded a full-tuition award in 2022. Counting from his June 30 announcement to Rocky’s on October 6, two named scholarships have been unveiled about fourteen weeks apart.
Rocky’s differs in timing more than in format. Where Guru’s award was aimed at Fall 2026, Rocky’s looks a year ahead and gives applicants until December 15 to apply. The Hope Scholarship pool is restricted to New York-based students with the highest financial need, while the announcement for Rocky’s award lists a single eligibility condition: applicants must be seeking enrollment as first-time freshmen for Fall 2027.
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Rocky came up in the Harlem-based A$AP Mob and broke through with his 2011 mixtape Live.Love.A$AP, which set off a major-label bidding war. His 2013 studio debut, *Long.Live.A$AP*, and 2015’s *At.Long.Last.A$AP*, executive produced by Danger Mouse, built the rest of a reputation as a rapper who moved easily between street style and high fashion.
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His latest chapter is Don’t Be Dumb, released in January 2026 as his first studio album in nearly eight years, with cover art designed by filmmaker Tim Burton, who also made videos tied to the era, and with Rocky adopting six alter egos drawn from phases of his own life. The rollout carried a Harlem component: with Bilt, Rocky covered rent for tenants in the Harlem building where he grew up for the month of January. The scholarship is another gesture aimed at a community of origin, though this one is open to applicants from anywhere who meet the enrollment condition.
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Applications run through December 15, 2026, at apply.liu.edu/rn. The only eligibility rule in the announcement is that the applicant be seeking enrollment at the Roc Nation School as a first-time freshman for Fall 2027. The announcement materials do not publish a selection rubric, an essay prompt, a grade threshold or a decision date, and they do not say whether the award extends beyond tuition to housing, fees or living costs.
The window is about ten weeks, from the October 6 announcement to the December 15 close, a little longer than the roughly nine weeks Khaled’s 2023 round allowed. One recipient will be chosen. The school’s own description frames the award as a package: tuition, mentorship, studio access and Dean’s Scholar status. Applications close December 15, 2026, and the selected student begins at the school in Fall 2027.
