Smyrna state rep: We need to throw HOPE a financial life line to keep kids going to college
Will we have fewer colleges students -- and grads -- as a result of cuts to HOPE? (AJC/file photo)
An AJC news story this morning notes a slowdown in enrollment at the state’s public campuses, reporting that while the University System of Georgia enrolled a record number of students this fall, more than 318,000, the figure is only a 2.1 percent increase from fall 2010, the system’s smallest increase since 2005.
The details in the story will be used to frame the upcoming HOPE debate in the Legislature. You can see one side of that argument below in the essay by Stacey Evans, a legislator from Smyrna.
Also a dozen campuses are teaching fewer students. The colleges are scattered across the state and they tend to enroll more low-income students who are more likely to struggle to pay for college. System leaders predicted and welcomed a slowdown, saying it would make the annual influx of new students easier to manage. The system has gained about 48,000 students since fall 2007.
Officials couldn’t link enrollment changes to just one cause, but with about one-third of the system’s students depending on HOPE, changes to the award can’t be ignored. Lawmakers revamped the lottery funded scholarship last spring, decreasing the aid students receive to keep the program viable for future recipients. As a result, thousands of students are bridging a financial gap and must pay hundreds of additional dollars in tuition, books and fees.
This story is the ideal lead-in to this essay by state Rep. Stacey Evans, D-Smyrna, on the need to put more money into HOPE. Evans gave a powerful speech last year on the House floor role on HOPE in transforming her own life. I expect more speeches this year as HOPE will again be up for debate.
Evans is a first generation college graduate and HOPE scholar. She represents Georgia House District 40 and is a partner in the law firm of Wood, Hernacki & Evans, LLC.
By Rep. Stacey Evans
Growing up in rural Ringgold in north Georgia, the daughter of carpet mill workers, college seemed a remote possibility for me financially. My parents always pushed me to work hard, but they were worried about paying the rent and making sure my brother and I had dinner on the table. For me, the HOPE scholarship and other financial aid was a life line.
After many late nights of studying, my 3.8 GPA earned me a HOPE scholarship and admission to the University of Georgia. But I didn’t stop working. I continued staying up late – this time to waitress to supplement my financial aid – and waking up early to study.
My story has a happy ending: I became my family’s first college graduate, went on to law school and now mentor students through the hurdles of the college admissions process. I have seen too many students who struggle in situations even I could have never imagined. These are students like Atlanta teen Marlanna, who missed the SAT several times because her mother did not have transportation to drive her to the test. Everything from transportation and filling out applications online when you don’t have a computer, to obtaining immunization records and ordering transcripts are harder when you don’t have the financial resources or someone in your family who has been through it before. And that’s before you even get a tuition bill.
Marlanna was recently accepted to Georgia Perimeter College. She too has a happy ending. But there are many students who don’t and those happy stories will become fewer. The hurdles that Marlanna faced are unimaginable to most.
This last legislative session, the “reform” measures placed yet another hurdle in front of low income students. In response to declining lottery revenues, the HOPE scholarship program has changed. It is now more difficult to obtain a scholarship and those who do, receive a smaller reward.
That means thousands of Georgia students will delay college or not go at all as the dollars available for the HOPE scholarship continue to deteriorate. Other current recipients of HOPE funds may have to drop out and possibly even be in default because of a decline in their education money. And the situation is only expected to get worse.
By fiscal year 2013, the state is expected to wipe through reserve funds and be expected to make even larger cuts to the HOPE program. This is why it is essential that Georgia consider all new revenue sources to supplement lottery funds. Like others, I need more time to consider whether video lottery terminals in a centralized location is the best option. But it is certainly an option that should be considered. It is discouraging to know that some have immediately dismissed the idea before it can even be studied.
The purpose of HOPE was to make college a possibility for more students. It was never intended to simply make it easier for those who have the resources to go. Our state is better off if we have more college-educated students and the only way to meet that goal is to make college more of a possibility for a larger portion of the population. The current HOPE scholarship program does not do that.
If you grow up in a family with a household income of less than $36,000 a year, you have a less than 5 percent chance of going to college. On the other hand, if you grow up in a family with a household income of more than $95,000 a year, you have more than a 75 percent chance of going to college. HOPE was intended to change these figures so that the family you were born into did not determine whether you were going to college or not. Georgia will not climb the economic charts as a state by continuing to simply send children of college graduates to college – that is already done. We need more first-generation college students.
HOPE helps us achieve that goal because it makes college more affordable to more students. But now that HOPE has been slashed and will continue to deteriorate over time, the program’s goals are lost.
We need to spread a message of hope to these students that that we want to help them get to college, not place yet another hurdle in their way. We need to show students that we will not close our minds to new ways to fund their education – even if those ideas are different than the way we are used to doing things in Georgia.
It is a new way of thinking that brought us the HOPE scholarship and that has helped so many first generation college graduates. And I hope that Georgia is open-minded enough to realize that the HOPE scholarship is now in need of its own life line.
–Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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119 comments Add your comment
Shar
November 20th, 2011
9:32 am
@catlady, my duaghter began at UGA in August 2010 and the new policy restricting the number of withdrawals was stressed, so I guess it began then or very shortly before.
My son’s friends who began there 5 years earlier expressed relief that they were not subject to such a policy. They seem to feel that almost no one would be able to keep the HOPE without being able to manipulate their transcripts through painless withdrawals.
Sad.
@Woody,. good point. A great many students arrive in college not merely academically unprepared but socially undisciplined. By the time they have tanked on their midterms and realized that they do not have the study skills they need and that no parent or teacher is around to ’save’ them with extra credit and enforced study time, they are staring at their first Fs and are a semester away from losing the HOPE. The scholarship does, indeed, fund too many semesters of partying and too few of academic achievement, particularly in the first year. A reimbursement system would address this, and should have been the change made instead of the stupid, destructive changes that Deal and his cronies shoved through.
Anonmom
November 20th, 2011
9:35 am
There’s an Emory Univ. Prof with a Psych book that came out recently (past year or 2) about the differences in how eastern and western society treat teenagers. If you really start to research it, I think you’ll find that they way America treats teenagers as “children” is really a “new” thing (past 30-40 years). Otherwise, historically, all cultures, and all societies, going back thousands of years (look at some of the passages in the Bible for anecdotal stories) treat teens as adults. We (Americans) act with disgust about stories today of young boys (12-14) being sent to war in Africa and other parts of the war and other young girls (12-15) being sent off to be married in Muslim countries in Africa and Asia but, maybe, it’s the way America has come to view teens rather than the other way around (no, I’m not saying it’s okay to send such children off to war and marriage –just pointing out that cultures in 2011 still do this). Historically, I bet many of you reading this blog have grandparents/great grandparents who were married by age 16 and/or who emigrated to America alone — leaving other relatives behind around this age. I think Andrew Carnegie was one of these…. My theory (and that supported by the Emory Prof’s research) is that by treating teens as children (e.g. by not allowing study halls because it’s too much free time in high school in DeKalb Schools) — teens rebel and act like kids. Their first real “taste” of adulthood is in college after graduation and they respond — not too well. If we treated our high school kids as adults and gave them responsibilities as adults across the board – rights and responsibilities and consequences — like they had before they became kids (the hormones are there and we give them driver’s licenses — yes, I’m familiar with studies that show that neurons in the brain aren’t fully connected until they’re 25) — they may surprise all of us and rise to the challenge and show us what they are capable of. This means holding them accountable across the board — not picking and choosing — and helping them understand that this is what this means. This means that we have to stop treating sports and music stars as “stars” without any responsibilities and consequences. We have to start teaching responsibility…. Then maybe we’d start seeing some differences. My view on parenting (along with keeping them busy). I’m sorry so many don’t agree with me.
Beverly Fraud
November 20th, 2011
10:12 am
1) The educational system *has* apparently failed some people here. For instance, someone thinks that saying the name of the state’s educational system is itself proof of grade inflation.
YES Shannon it IS…if you are able to INFER. Are you per chance a member of the system? Perhaps you are a WEE bit defensive. Absolutely ZERO need to be. But is it not the university system ITSELF that is making the case that too many of its students are ILL prepared?
If it wasn’t for the university SELF REPORTING that its students are ILL prepared, grade inflation wouldn’t be so evident; is that not true?
Cere
November 20th, 2011
12:09 pm
It’s nice that Ms. Evans cares so much about HOPE and access to college, but I have to agree with the poster who pointed out that the very group of legislators she is a party to have continued to under-fund and deny access to a quality basic k-12 education in our state. Add to these cuts the ‘equalization’ grants taken from low-performing counties such as DeKalb and redistributed to “poor, rural” counties (surprisingly, such as Gwinnett) then we have a formula for k-12 disaster. In fact, this under-funding is showing it’s lack of results in the fact that such a large number of college freshmen in Georgia require remedial classes because they are so under-prepared.
Like Ms. Evans, I like to see smart, motivated kids from poor roots attend college and succeed. I just hope she can see her way clear to agree that the state needs to fully fund a basic k-12 education (and hopefully vocational education for those who don’t attend college).
For more read our post at DeKalb School Watch:
http://dekalbschoolwatch.blogspot.com/2011/11/penny-by-penny.html
FYI
November 20th, 2011
12:52 pm
About limiting college course withdrawals… GSU has been doing this since 2008 or 2009.
Those students who sign up for classes, find they’re getting D’s or F’s, and then withdraw also are getting several weeks of free instruction. They take up spaces in classes during registration and keep out other students who would finish the course; and add to the problem of students not being able to graduate in 4 years because they can’t get into required classes.
Students can get out of classes in the first week during the drop-add period, but after that it counts as a withdrawal. They can’t get something for nothing by staying in class for 6 weeks and then withdrawing without any penalty.
Anonmom
November 20th, 2011
1:57 pm
There’s a lot of scholarship money at a lot schools around the country for poor kids who are smart and hard workers and who do well in school. The federal government has a number of programs available for poor kids in college. It’s really the kid “in the middle” who are feeling the “crunch” more than the poor — the poor may need help in getting the guidance they need in middle school and in high school to “stay on track” in order to get the education they need there to be prepared for college and to apply to college and to be ready for college or to be ready for the “real world” but the funding for college should they (the poor) make it that far really does seem to be there (e.g. if a poor kids makes it into an Ivy league school, they can pretty much get a full ride). I think the focus here is really backwards. The focus really needs to be on preparing the kids for the “real world” when they are in middle and high school. There are also a number of studeis out that indicate (maybe not conclusively) that the “Hope” money really should be spent at the 3-4 year old level and not at the college level since there is an enormous difference between the “background” of a middle class a kid starting kindergarten and a poor kid from an uneduated home starting and the funds can possibly level the field there (there are studies that show the diferences disapper by 3rd grade too). An argument can also be made that HOPE has done a great job of keeping our “best and brightest” in state by keeping some kids at UGA and GA Tech instead of them going out of state over the past 10-15 years and has brought those schools rankings up — a lot — so maybe HOPE should only be used for kids headed into “desired” fields who are the “best and brightest” — with certain SAT scroes so you can’t have grade inflation (it’s hard to cheat the SAT or ACT) and you can make the SAT/ACT score “manageable” (e.g. it doesn’t have to be 95%) but so that it shows “college readiness” — and then only allow it to be used for STEM and lose the grade component and work on passing so it “works” across the board but stops the “game playing” and we can graduate the graduates we need (e.g. math and science teachers from good schools or doctors, etc.). Just some rambling thoughts. It doesn’t make sense to me to spend the funds to pretend like we’re getting kids through college when a huge number are losing HOPE and another huge numbers aren’t ready for college at all.. that seems silly and is a real waste of resources. The political correctness should be taken out of the equation and reality should quick in. Let it be used for community college for “college readiness” if the kids want to go to college and aren’t ready. There are legitimate ways to “skin the cat” .
Anonmom
November 20th, 2011
1:59 pm
It would be interesting too if the colleges “asses” the high schools (or the school districts) if the kids needed remediation when they got there for the remdiation tuitiion.. that would shake the districts up a bit….
Mountain Man
November 21st, 2011
7:59 am
“Paying 10-20% of the cost of your education is not a hardship.”
Hope, even when it paid 100% of TUITION, came nowhere close to paying 80-90% of clooege costs. Fortunately, the last of three children just graduated from college, but we remember the BOOKS (approx. $600 per semester), FEES, room and board; all that added up to a very pricey sum. College fees have increased hugely over the past 8 years. Professors keep assigning new and more costly books (usually written by, you guessed it, the PROFESSOR). Colleges need to examine and rein in some of these costs that students are getting hit with.
Marlena2
November 21st, 2011
8:30 am
The HOPE Scholarship is a phenomenal opportunity for those students that desire to attend college and have a vision as to where he/she desires to take their career. However, many students in Grade 12 still are unaware of their career choice because everyone is pushing traditional college and few are opening their minds to choice. What is needed in our society and specifically in Georgia? Funding must be funneled into the creation of high schools with a vocational/technical swing.Why, in this society, do we push Shakespeare at all students when we could be having students aware of technical reading? Why must all read Shakespeare all four years of high school? We must begin creating engineers, plumbers, auto technicians, cosmetologists, carpenters, robotics,nurses, electricians etc. ..Do you get my gist? We are not exposing our children to the abundance of choices.Educators are informed they must differentiate in their classrooms, so why not differentiate when it comes to our children’s career choice? How much does it cost you to call a plumber and make a home visit? How much does it cost per hour to have the GEEK Squad come to your home to repair your computer? Our children need skills and NOT all students need college in the traditional sense. In our economy, sadly, the college degree does little to secure a job, no less a profession. So, push your state and congressman and counties to stop being myopic with our children’s lives. Let’s truly educate our children for a future.
cosby
November 21st, 2011
8:52 am
put Hope back ot its original intent – College Education – and cut the other entitlements as pre – K. They turned it into a welfare program and as usual, we can not afford another welfare / moocher program! “Nuf said
Anonmom
November 21st, 2011
9:02 am
Marlena2 — I agree with you – the “north” (Ohio and NJ) have really incredible VoTech programs available for high school… down here though, for some reason, mention VoTech, and you are being, guess what? A racist…. So it’s okay to have the kids reach for college (that they may not be prepared for or which may lead to no where great whereas they maybe could be really happy and really wealthy as a carpenter or plumber or whatever lies ahead with some skill they’ve got that society needs) or have them drop out but real VoTech isn’t okay (and some state’s VoTech actually leads to college — e.g. in some agricultural programs)… Have I mentioned that we (GA) should be mimicking what is really working elsewhere and that we should stop “recreating” the wheel…….
howard
November 21st, 2011
9:07 am
let’s face it, under Republican leadership for the past decade Georgia’s entire public education has few if any success stories and is leading to a slow decline on many levels… Our public education system is being intentionally starved to death by Republican lawmakers intent on undermining schools, teachers and students at all levels.
Ole Guy
November 22nd, 2011
5:20 pm
CA, proof of grade inflation lies in the rates of remediation at colleges and universities across the land. By definition, recipients of HOPE are “scholars” of “A/B” quality. Having received those fine grades in the high school arena, it would be logically presumed that the buding college student is at least optimally prepared to handle an academic work load at the collegiate level. THIS is why far too many collegians find themselves “majoring” in remediation.
During my somewhat abreviated sojourn within the public school environment…5th grade…I administered a few math exams, over material which had been covered prior to my arrival, in order that I might evaluate my charges. Employing the politically correct descriptions of the day, the grades were somewhat dismal AT BEST. Furthermore, these grades contrasted, vividly, with the glowing grades their previous teacher had assigned. Upon questioning this disparity, I was told…by this “esteemed” teacher, who had been the recipient of many “teacher of the day/month/year” awards…that grades were awarded on the basis of “trying”.
It came as no mystery that many parents belonged to the same church as this esteemed teacher, played golf with “Mr Esteemed Teacher”, etc, etc, etc.
This, CA, is the indisputable proof of grade inflation.
Ole Gal
November 24th, 2011
4:54 pm
@ Ole Guy.
I’m older than you are, since you noted on another blog that you were born after the end of WWII.
Keep your cheery outlook on life, which probably results from a life well-lived. But I really think that a lot of the “kids” have fears of the future and how they’ll handle it, no matter how they seem outwardly….and in many ways, I think we’ve left them a worse world to deal with than we ever had to handle.
But have a good Thanksgiving.
Ole Guy
November 24th, 2011
10:38 pm
No arguement there, Gal. Somewhere along the way, we really screwed things up for the younger gens. I won’t elaborate on history, nor point accusatory fingers…in the end, we somehow all share responsibility on that one. However, the bottom line, Gal, remains untouched and unvarnished…these KIDS are responsible for what lies ahead, and more importantly, how they intend to address the issues which they will surely face. In order to do so, they must realize that a solid educational foundation is paramount.
Unlike that Greatest Generation, which managed to both survive the Sad 30s, and bring the world back from the brink of insanity, today’s young folks have complete access to news of global conditions and, through applied intelect, what to do about it. The early/mid years of the 20th Century saw tremendous strides in all sectors of contemporary society. Despite resource-draining global commitments, the second half of that Century realized awsome refinements in our global prestige, standards of living, and an optimistic outlook for a bright future. Much as our forefathers have done, we have left those, who are destined to “pick up the ball and run with it”, a “mixed bag” of opportunities and heartache. The Marine Corps mantra of the 60s…”I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN”…rings especially true today, just as it has for past generations. As with many experiences, that of the military seems to somehow “make or break” those who accept the challenge…”IF IT DON’T KILLYA, IT’L MAKE YA STRONGER”. This is precisely where the younger gen stands today.
Their fears are very normal…paralysis and inaction, in the form of ignoring the educational opportunities which are available to them, are not. This is why I become somewhat angry when I see much of the educational malaise attributed to such outside influences as lack of parental involvement, less-than ideal educational “infrastructure”, etc. These KIDS aren’t stupid; as with young gens before them, they’re simply too damn lazy and preoccupied with the useless byproducts of a civilization which “done gone ape”…but hey! Is this not exactly what our forefathers said? “The world is going to @#* in a handbasket”. What did YOUR gen do…what did MY gen do? We adapted; we overcame; we, as a civilization, flourished. Those who failed in this universal challenge also failed to realize (as you put it…and thank you) A LIFE WELL-LIVED.
Jezel
November 25th, 2011
6:42 am
Who are the legislators that took funds from HOPE and used those funds to “shore up” shortfalls in other parts of the state budget? No one wants to talk about that forgotten fact.
Ole Guy
November 25th, 2011
11:34 am
Jez, I’m sure we’re painfully aware of the legislators, at both federal and state levels, who “specialize” in fiscal mismanagement. I believe a few “well-placed” keepers of the fiscal gates have even experienced financial woes on the domestic front. The sad issue, however, is not the fact that we don’t talk about these things…after all, money mismanagement has become the hallmark of socioeconomic America…the sad issue lies in the fact that we, as an uninformed constituency, continue to vote in the same charlatans; the career politicians who lose all sense of economic reality (here-a-billion-there-a-billion…next thing ya know, we’re talkin’ real money).
Adding to this sad state of affairs, we don’t demand accountability at the public spending levels. We’ve seen the results of the (so-called) area “town meetings” over educational issues…much dialog while the pre-ordained battle plans are set into motion.
But you are absolutely right, Jezel. Perhaps the AJC might see fit to explore this issue in “behind-the-doors” detail.
Mike McQueary
December 1st, 2011
7:05 am
Since more and more students are qualifying for HOPE merely because of grade inflation…why don’t we tie HOPE to SAT scores and then watch the number of students “qualified” drop dramatically.
Of course, we can’t do that. Standardized test are all racially bias.
Georgia Matters
December 1st, 2011
4:27 pm
TO SouthernGal, they do. Those students who attend technical school to learn a trade are eligable for the Hope Grant. I know, my son went though on that for Heating and air.