That means a highly accomplished academic student is not automatically disqualified simply because he or she earns As.
In fact, Ball State's own history contains examples that demonstrate exactly that.
The deeper principle was never that good grades are bad.
It was that good grades should not be the only recognized form of talent.
The Awards Became Significant
Letterman's support was not symbolic.
Ball State records show that the scholarship developed into three annual awards.
For years, the first-place recipient received $10,000, the first runner-up received $5,000, and the second runner-up received $3,333.
Ball State documented those amounts repeatedly in university materials, including announcements in 2007 and the later scholarship application.
For a college student, that can represent a meaningful amount of financial support.
According to the university's scholarship application, the money could be applied toward tuition, room and board, and personal expenses directly related to attending Ball State during the school year.
Since the late 1980s, three scholarships were generally awarded each academic year under the program.
What Letterman created, therefore, was not simply a philosophical statement about creativity.
It was a financial mechanism that gave creative work real value.
An Idea Rooted in His Own Life
Letterman's decision makes more sense when viewed through his college experience.
He was not the student who could point to an immaculate academic record and say that conventional measurements had predicted his future.
Instead, one of the central stories he later told about Ball State involved a teacher recognizing possibility in him when he himself seemed uncertain about his direction.
Professor Darrell Wible did not transform Letterman's grades into the defining feature of his life.
He helped him find broadcasting.
Letterman later said Wible had helped “a poor student find a path.”
That phrase captures something larger than Letterman's individual experience.
A poor academic performance and a lack of potential are not the same thing.
Students struggle for different reasons.
Some have not discovered the field that motivates them.
Some learn differently.
Some are creative but not especially good test takers.
Some spend their time making films, writing stories, composing music, building things, working jobs or experimenting with ideas that may not translate directly into higher classroom scores.
Others simply mature later.
None of that means academic standards are meaningless.
Grades provide useful information.
But they are information about a specific category of performance.
They are not a complete map of a human being.
What a GPA Can Measure
Grades exist for a reason.
They can reflect whether a student understands course material.
They can indicate discipline, consistency and the ability to meet deadlines.
In many fields, strong academic performance is essential.
No serious scholarship program needs to pretend otherwise.
But a GPA is also an aggregation.
It turns many classes, assignments and exams into a number.
That number is useful precisely because it simplifies complicated information.
Its weakness is also that it simplifies complicated information.
A 2.5 GPA cannot tell you whether someone has an extraordinary ear for dialogue.
A 3.0 cannot tell you whether a student sees visual compositions that others miss.
A transcript cannot fully reveal who is capable of creating a compelling documentary, designing an original digital project or writing a script that makes an audience feel something.
And a 4.0 cannot guarantee those abilities either.
The Letterman scholarship created a separate lane.
Students could be judged through the work they imagined and produced.
Creativity Is Harder to Quantify
This is also what makes the scholarship unusual.
Academic systems naturally prefer measurements that are easy to compare.
GPAs are numbers.
Standardized-test results are numbers.
Class rankings are numbers.
Creativity resists that kind of simplicity.
How do you assign a number to an original idea?
How do you compare a screenplay against an audio project?
How do you determine whether a strange idea that initially looks risky is actually evidence that a student thinks differently?
Those judgments are difficult.
Yet in industries such as television, film, radio, digital media, advertising and entertainment, those qualities can eventually become far more important than the ability to earn perfect marks.
Letterman's own career is an obvious example.
His success did not come from being the most conventional broadcaster.
Much of it came from doing things that conventional television might not have expected.
From C Student to Communications Icon
The contrast between Letterman's academic self-description and his eventual career is what gives the scholarship its symbolic force.
A student who described himself as barely earning Cs ultimately became one of the most influential television hosts of his era.
His shows accumulated major recognition, including numerous Emmy nominations and awards, while his approach influenced generations of comedians and broadcasters who followed him.
Ball State eventually named its communication and media building after him.
The university announced the naming in 2007, citing both his professional accomplishments and his longstanding support of students through the Letterman Scholarships.
At the time, Ball State described the scholarships as annual awards for telecommunications students submitting projects such as screenplays, music videos, short films and storyboards.
That is an extraordinary arc.
A student who was not distinguished by his grades returned decades later as one of the university's best-known alumni — and helped fund opportunities for students whose abilities might also be more visible in what they created than in what appeared on a report card.
His Support Went Beyond Scholarships
Letterman's relationship with Ball State did not end with the scholarship.
He helped fund the construction of WCRD, the university's student radio station, which began in the mid-1980s. Ball State notes that the final letters of WCRD became associated with the phrase “Cardinal Radio Dave.”
He also supported the university's communications programs and later funded a lecture and workshop series.
Through that program, Ball State brought major figures from media, business and public life to campus, including Ted Koppel, Angela Ahrendts and Oprah Winfrey. Letterman himself returned for several campus conversations.
His connection to the university was therefore not merely nostalgic.
It became institutional.
He helped create facilities, scholarships and experiences that future students could use long after he graduated.
A Scholarship That Challenges an Old Assumption
The most interesting part of the Letterman scholarship is not really that a celebrity gave money to his former university.
Famous alumni do that frequently.
What stands out is the rule he chose.
Do not use grades as the primary measure.
That challenges an assumption students often absorb very early: that the people with the highest grades are automatically the people with the greatest promise.
Sometimes they are.
Sometimes they are not.
Academic excellence deserves recognition.
But creativity is another form of excellence.
So is resilience.
So is originality.