In the last decade, states have held up Georgia’s HOPE scholarship as a model for funding education through the lottery. Now that its public colleges and universities are nearly bursting at the seams with more than 250,000 students, lawmakers fear the program could become a victim of its own success.
Though the Georgia Lottery is facing a record year–with $1.33 billion in ticket sales during the last six months of 2003, $376 million of which will go to HOPE–lawmakers are struggling to streamline the scholarship because of concerns that the program could run out of money within the decade.
One of the most heated battles in the General Assembly this year has been over preserving the HOPE Scholarship, which has provided more than $2.5 billion to pay tuition and purchase books for about 750,000 students since the Georgia Lottery began operating in 1993.
For more than two decades, states have been using legalized gambling to help fill shrinking coffers. At least 41 states have lotteries that fund everything from senior citizen centers to prisons. But it has been the promise of better public education that has caught the interest of most voters. Still, when money for other programs dries up, lawmakers have been known to dip into education reserves.
While about two dozen states, including Illinois, New York, Michigan and Missouri, devote 100 percent of their proceeds to education, Georgia was among the first to include legislation that forbids lottery proceeds from going anywhere but to specific prekindergarten and postsecondary programs.
In Illinois, all lottery profits are required to go to the state’s Common School Fund, which provided $540 million last year for K-12 public schools, or 3 percent of all government education funding. However, several states, including Illinois, have seen a drop in education funds in the last decade as lottery proceeds have declined.
`Gambling on education’
“Supporters have been able to sell the lottery to voters with the idea that they will raise money and give students more opportunity for education. But you are gambling on education with gambling dollars, and that doesn’t work,” said Rodney Stanley, an assistant professor at the Institute of Government at Tennessee State University. “In Georgia, the requirements are so watered down that you end up giving scholarships to a lot of people who don’t need them. But they’re not increasing classroom size or increasing the number of instructors. The result is overcrowding.”
HOPE–Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally–offers full tuition, as well as mandatory fees and an allowance for books, to a public college or university to high school students with a B average or higher.
While new lotteries under way in South Carolina and Tennessee, modeled after Georgia’s, are expected to hurt lottery sales along Georgia’s borders with those states, funding for HOPE has skyrocketed. That is largely because more students are becoming eligible for the scholarship, officials said.
While the HOPE scholarship has given more Georgians an opportunity to go to college, it has been a double-edged sword, according to educators. Crowding has become such an issue that many of the state’s public colleges have had to raise admission standards, turn away students or place them on waiting lists, and move up application deadlines in an effort to relieve overcrowding.
The University of Georgia, the state’s flagship university, this year plans to admit fewer freshmen and place others on a waiting list until May, a month longer than when students are normally notified of admission. Georgia State University, where freshman enrollment has soared in the last decade, moved its application deadline up by three months and raised its minimum SAT scores and GPA requirements.On one side, Republicans, led by Gov. Sonny Perdue, want to toughen the requirements for obtaining and retaining the scholarships and also cut $125 million in payments for books and fees provided by the scholarship.
“We have a situation where lottery revenues are increasing but the rate of enrollment is getting to the point it could outpace revenue and bankrupt the program,” said Perdue spokeswoman Loretta Lepore. .”
Tighter standards proposed
Democrats, led by Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, agree with tightening requirements but oppose the cuts. Taylor has proposed that scholarship recipients maintain a 3.0 grade point average, tougher than the current standard, and that their grades be evaluated more often, which could kick recipients off the scholarship quicker.
“Instead of taking an ax to the program, I hope people will take a conservative approach and preserve it,” he said. “If we begin cutting benefits, like books and fees, what is next? This kind of approach is like a tax increase on students or their parents.”
Brittany Young, a 20-year-old sophomore at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, said she relies heavily on the money she receives for books and tuition. And though tuition has gone up in Georgia–as it has at colleges across the nation–Young has not felt the pinch.
“I really depend on that money. It pays my complete tuition, which is about $3,000 a year. I don’t even see the financial-aid check; it’s sent directly to the school so I don’t have to worry about rising costs,” said Young, one of two children her divorced parentsare sending to school.
Like many college students, Young’s sister, Ashley, a junior at West Georgia College in Carrollton, lost her HOPE scholarship after the first year, unable to maintain a B average. While Brittany Young has maintained a 3.0 GPA, under the proposed legislation she would lose the scholarship if her average falls even slightly.
“I would just have to get a loan,” Young said. “But I would rather not have to worry about paying a lot of money back after I graduate.”
The HOPE Scholarship, instituted while Democratic Sen. Zell Miller was governor, is one of the state’s most popular programs, saving families–regardless of income–thousands of dollars to send their children to college. Some students said cutting the book and fee payments would cause hardships that they might not be able to overcome.
Two years ago, Frankye Pope, a 61-year-old grandmother, retired from her the post office and enrolled at Morris Brown College to pursue a degree in organizational management. During the second semester of her second year, she qualified for HOPE, but the college lost its accreditation, and Pope, like hundreds of other students, was forced to drop out.
“It was a lifelong dream to go to college and HOPE was helping me to fulfill that dream,” said Pope.
