LITTLE ROCK — The Legislature’s education committees agreed Monday to study possible changes to state lottery-funded scholarships, including the amounts awarded and limiting school choices for students who score the minimum requirement on the ACT.
A tiered award system, in which scholarship amounts would increase every year based on student achievement, and requiring students who score the minimum ACT required to qualify for a scholarship to attend a two-year school are among the possible changes lawmakers will consider.
The aim of the study is to find ways to improve scholarship retention, balance the percentages of scholarship recipients attending four-year and two-year schools, and free more scholarship funding for nontraditional students.
“We’ve got to have data to show … before we do anything,” said Sen. Jimmy Jeffress, D-Crossett. The House and Senate education approved undertaking the study with little discussion.
Sen. Johnny Key, R-Mountain Home, a co-sponsor of the proposal, said he expects the joint panel to discuss results of the study this summer or fall, and any legislation developed could be considered in the 2013 regular session.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
To qualify for a lottery scholarship, a student must either score 19 or higher on the ACT or finish high school with at least a 2.5 grade point average. Jeffress, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he wants to see whether the state could save money by requiring students with the minimum ACT score to attend a two-year-college the first year.
“In my way of thinking, I know that a weak student would get more out of a small setting, where (they) have more assistance and help, without being thrown into a great big ocean to try to try to swim on his own,” Jeffress said.
“I’m sure there will be a lot of opposition to that,” Jeffress added.
Later Monday, Shane Broadway, interim director of the state Department of Higher Education, said about 43 percent of first-year scholarship recipients who scored a 19 on the ACT retained the award for the second year.
About 34 percent of those students who attended a two-year college retained the award while about 46 percent who attended four-year school kept their scholarship. The interim study request resulted from a legislative hearing in December at which lawmakers heard that 41 percent of all freshmen who received a scholarship in the fall of 2009 retained the award for their sophomore year.
The percentage of students choosing four-year colleges over two-year schools rose from 60 percent in the fall of 2009, the first year for lottery-funded scholarships, to 80 percent in the fall of 2010. Lottery scholarship amounts originally were $5,000 a year to attend four-year institutions and $2,500 for two-year schools. Last year, the Legislature reduced the awards to $4,500 and $2,250. Key said a tiered award system, with freshmen receiving the lowest amount, is how the old Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship was awarded.
He and Jeffress said changes to the awards could free up some scholarship money for non-traditional students — those who wait a few years after graduating high school to attend college, or who attend briefly, left and now have returned.
Studies have shown that non-traditional students have a higher retention rate, but the state lottery currently limits the pool of scholarship money available for those students to $12 million annually.
Because of the cap, officials say there is a backlog of about 5,800 non-traditional students waiting to receive lottery scholarships.