Since its inception in 1993, the HOPE scholarship program has awarded more than $6.4 billion to 1.5 million students attending Georgia colleges, universities and technical colleges.
The popular scholarship program, which has undergone many tweaks through the years, saw significant changes in 2011, when HB 326 toughened the academic requirements and lowered the tuition benefits. During the 2013 Georgia legislative session, state lawmakers have again proposed changes to HOPE, which always raises concerns among Georgia citizens who have seen it open doors to college degrees and job skills training.
Timothy Connell, president of the Georgia Student Finance Commission, has a message for Georgia families: “HOPE will be there for future students. The changes we have put in place are to ensure that future students will receive whatever HOPE funding they are entitled to receive.”
To qualify for the HOPE Scholarship, students must graduate from a HOPE-eligible high school with a grade point average of at least 3.0, meet residency requirements, be in compliance with Selective Service registration and the Georgia Drug-Free Postsecondary Education Act of 1990. To keep the scholarship, students must maintain a minimum 3.0 GPA while they’re in college. If students lose the scholarship, they can regain it one time.
Since state law now requires verification of citizenship, those students applying for HOPE for the 2013-14 school year will need to fill out the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid), which can be done on the GAcollege411 website (www.gacollege411.org)," Connell said.
Changes in 2011
To help keep the lottery-funded system solvent, HB 326 was passed in 2011, lowering the tuition payout amounts for HOPE scholars. Rising tuition costs coupled with greater-than-expected awards and lower lottery revenues were making it harder for the program to meet its fiscal obligations.
“The biggest change we made was to uncouple the HOPE benefit from future increases in college tuition,” Connell said. “In 2011, the state set the HOPE amount as a percentage (90 percent) of the tuition charged by public schools at that time. As schools raised tuitions, the percentage that the benefit would pay decreased accordingly.”
HOPE scholars who attend private colleges in Georgia get $1,800 per semester (down from $2,000) toward their tuition, in addition to the Tuition Equalization Grant (about $350 per semester).
Another major change was increasing the minimum GPA to keep the HOPE Grant from 2.0 to 3.0. The grant is available to Georgia residents who are seeking a certificate or diploma at a school in the Technical College System of Georgia.
While lowering the tuition benefit didn’t significantly affect the number of HOPE recipients enrolled in University System of Georgia schools in 2012, it did impact how many students attended Georgia’s technical colleges. Technical colleges in Georgia saw an enrollment decrease of about 24,500, including about 9,000 fewer HOPE Grant recipients.
Current proposals
To help reverse that trend, state lawmakers have proposed legislation during the 2013 session that would help students. As of press time, SB 59 and HB 372 would restore the minimum GPA for HOPE Grant recipients back to 2.0. Another bill (SB 107/SR 184) proposes a constitutional amendment that would require the University System of Georgia and the Technical College System of Georgia to accept the HOPE Scholarship amount as full tuition, eliminating out-of-pocket tuition payments for HOPE students.
SB 112 proposes that graduating seniors in the top 3 percent of their high school’s graduating class would automatically qualify for the Zell Miller Scholarship, which was created by legislators in 2011. Currently, recipients must carry a minimum high school 3.7 GPA and score at least a 1200 combined critical reading and math score on the SAT test or a minimum score of 26 on the ACT. To keep the scholarship, a student must maintain a 3.3 GPA in college.
“With (lottery) reserves up, Gov. Deal has also recommended a 3 percent increase in the HOPE benefit in next year’s budget. We have projected that that increase could be sustained through 2018,” Connell said.
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