HOPE Scholarship

HOPE (Reverse acronym for "helping outstanding pupils educationally") is a widely celebrated university scholarship program funded by ticket sales for the Georgia lottery and administerd by the Georgia Student Finance Commission. It was created in 1993 by the state legislature and has since been copied by several other states.

The program is entirely merit-based, meaning that a student's ability to pay for his/her own education is not a factor in determining if he/she receives it.

The basic requirements are:

• The student is a resident of the state of Georgia
• The student graduated high school with a 3.0 GPA ('B average')
• The student maintains a 3.0 GPA throughout college

The scholarship pays full tuition, a $150 per semester book allowance, and most mandatory fees for the recipient to attend any public university in Georgia (or an equivalent amount towards tuition for private universities in Georgia) up until the semester in which they take their 127th academic hour (roughly the time required to earn an undergraduate bachelor's degree).

As of 2005, there is doubt as to whether sufficient funding will be available to continue offering the scholarship, at least in its present form. Several suggestions have been made to decrease the program's costs, including tying the scholarship to standardized test scores (thus negating the effect of grade inflation), or checking students' GPAs more frequently to avoid paying tuition of students who have dipped below 3.0. Governor Sonny Perdue has frequently been criticized for mismanaging the HOPE program.

Goals

The HOPE program has two stated goals:

1.) To offer academically superior students who would not otherwise be able to afford college the opportunity to receieve higher education and

2.) To offer an incentive to academically superior students who can afford to attend college to remain in the state of Georgia, thus combatting the "brain drain" phenomenon Georgia was experiencing before the program's inception wherin most of the most talented students were attending universities in other states.

Common Criticisms

HOPE has largely been blamed for increased levels of grade inflation in Georgia schools, with instructors feeling pressured to give their students higher grades to maintain the necessary GPA for the scholarship.

In addition, not all universities are created equal. A student at the competitive Georgia Tech will often struggle to maintain the necessary GPA no matter how hard they work, whereas the same student at Georgia Southern could maintain the GPA with ease. In this way, the scholarship acts as a disincentive for students to attend Georgia's most challenging universities.