The Georgia General Assembly just allocated millions of dollars to establish a new need-based scholarship. But experts warn that it won’t cover the cost of attendance for low-income and rural students.
The state’s DREAMS (Dedicating Resources to Educationally Advance More Students) scholarship ends Georgia’s designation as one of two states without state-funded need-based aid for higher education.
“It takes us off the naughty list of not having a program like that,” said Sonny Perdue, chancellor of the University System of Georgia (USG), which oversees the state’s public colleges and universities. “We still have compassion for those students who have to struggle to make the cost and the sacrifices for obtaining a higher education.”
This legislative session, the state legislature appropriated $325 million to start the state’s need-based aid program.
More than $12 million will go to Georgia’s students this academic year with maximum awards of $3,000 per student annually. Another $12.5 million will go out next year, while the remaining $300 million will serve as a scholarship endowment.
Rural Students
For Georgia’s rural students, knowing there’s need-based aid available may encourage more students to pursue higher education.
“In rural communities, concerns about pay, access to jobs, poverty level can really constrain thinking about opportunities for post-secondary education,” said Darris Means, Dean’s Fellow for Rural Education and professor of educational leadership at Clemson University.
Georgia currently has the second highest share of adults with federal student loan debt in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Education data.
Ray Li, policy counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, said that he believes Georgia has a high student debt burden — despite having lower higher education costs than other states — because Georgia has not provided need-based aid.
Means said that for lower-income students, fear of losing merit-based scholarships can lead them to opt out of higher education altogether.
“For students who are coming from particularly lower income backgrounds, that can be a very scary feeling of saying, ‘I thought I had money to pursue higher education, but I had a rocky first semester of college and my GPA went below that 3.0 or at 3.3 depending on the scholarship, and I’m no longer eligible for that huge significant pot of money,’” Means said.
Georgia has the fourth highest nonmetro Black population in the country by share of state population, according to U.S. Census data. Means said understanding how higher education access for the state’s rural population also means understanding the dual piece of social class for the state’s rural Black students.
The state’s merit-based scholarship for higher education, HOPE, started in 1993.
The HOPE scholarship primarily served rural students until 2011 when the legislature raised eligibility requirements, according to analysis by Trouble in God’s Country.
“People really love the program, but it leaves too many students behind,” said Ray Li, policy counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.
Li said that Black students, low-income students and rural students were most likely to be left behind by HOPE, with public HBCUs in rural communities having some of the state’s lowest HOPE enrollment rates.
Li said that for students receiving HOPE, HOPE isn’t enough because it covers tuition but doesn’t cover other costs of attendance, which are driving the bulk of students’ costs.
Forty-two percent of students who enter with HOPE lose it by their 90th credit hour, according to analysis of 2013 to 2019 USG data published in MIT’s Education Finance and Policy Journal. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to lose the scholarship and less likely to regain it.
Perdue and Chris Green, Georgia Student Finance Commission (GSFC) president, said that they view DREAMS as a complement to the state’s existing merit-aid programs, rather than a stand-alone program.
“DREAMS was really designed to help students close that affordability gap that might remain after HOPE and Zell Miller scholarships,” Green said.
Funding Concerns
Some are concerned that the $325 million appropriation for DREAMS won’t go far enough.
The scholarship’s annual funding is divided among the state’s public colleges and universities based on the number of Pell-eligible students. Students must receive Pell to be eligible for DREAMS.
DREAMS scholarship’s maximum award is $3,000 per student annually. The Georgia Senate Study Committee on Higher Education Affordability found that the average unmet need of Pell Grant recipients enrolled in Georgia public 4-year colleges is $11,883 a year.
With DREAMS, Georgia has the lowest annual state funding for need-based aid per capita by college-age population out of any state in the region, $11.51 per capita college-age population, defined as those between 18 and 24 years-old.
The average annual funding need-based per capita by college-age population among Southern states is $133.53.
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According to Li, the Legal Defense Fund’s models showed that Georgia would need a $1.5 billion endowment — five times larger than the actual current endowment — in order to allocate scholarships annually at the same level North Carolina funds their state-funded need-based aid program for higher education.
Perdue said that he hopes the state’s funding commitment will bring in the private funding.
“Philanthropic foundations indicated to me that they would be willing to contribute once the state stepped in, but until the state showed out, then they were not willing to be the first,” Perdue said.
He said that he aims to grow the endowment to $1.5 billion through private donors in the next five to seven years.
“I’m excited about the outgoing amount, but also excited about the incoming amount, which we have a challenge to raise,” Perdue said.
Financial Literacy and Work Requirements
The scholarship requires recipients to complete an online financial literacy course. Recipients must also complete a 60-hour per semester work requirement.
No similar programs in other states have work requirements, neither do any of Georgia’s existing aid programs.
“We think that it’s kind of counterproductive to the entire thesis here, which is that students shouldn’t have to work to be able to attend college,” Li said, who advocated against the work requirement during the legislative session. “College can be your full-time job, and for many students, it is.”
Institutions are notified of their total campus allocations each May, based on the number of Pell-eligible students on campus. Individual institutions are responsible for determining how to allocate the scholarship among their students and how to interpret the work requirement.
“Our post-secondary partners know their students best, and so they will really be the ones determining which students receive these funds,” Green said.
Green said that GFSC has encouraged institutions to be “student-friendly” in interpreting the DREAMS Scholarship’s service requirement — allowing a variety of activities to fulfill the requirement.
Li said that he also encourages institutions to interpret the scholarship’s work requirement liberally to include an array of campus contributions, including involvement in student organizations and volunteer work, to make sure the scholarship reaches students who may need it most.
Li said that institutions should automatically consider students for the DREAMS scholarship through regular financial aid, rather than requiring a separate application.
“We don’t want that knowledge gap to be the difference between receiving this money and not,” Li said.
The post Georgia’s First Need-Based Aid Comes to Campus this Fall — But Is It Enough? appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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