Remember that 30 percent tuition increase UF President Bernie Machen proposed? It looks like that increase would hit students even harder because the Florida Legislature has to make cuts to Bright Futures after it convenes on March 8.
There’s talk of dropping the current top-tier $3,750 scholarship to $2,900. Our lawmakers are considering other options, such as restricting the awards to financially needy recipients. Another proposal encourages them to force graduates to repay their awards if they leave Florida after receiving their degrees.
There’s a better way to cut costs and reap more benefits for the state.
We have to raise our standards for receiving the award. The current system gives money to students scoring a 970 on the SAT, which is below the national average of 1017. We aren’t supposed to be rewarding students who perform in the realm of mediocrity and inflate their GPAs; the program was designed to keep our best and brightest in the state, preventing a brain drain. The fact that 98 percent of UF students qualify for the award speaks to our need to restrict it. Raising the bar will not only save the program money; it will drive students to perform better in school and on tests.
Of course, the legislature is looking at this idea, but they are only considering raising the requirement for the lower-tier award by 10 points and gradually working up year after year. Why not bump it up to the 75th percentile of SAT scores now? To receive a merit-based scholarship, it’s not unreasonable to expect a student to perform better than three-fourths of his or her peers.
Some say this will eliminate a disproportionate percentage of minorities from the pool of award recipients, but those numbers speak to a separate, much larger problem of SAT scores and school performance correlating to income when income still relates to race.
However, the politicians are considering steering Bright Futures toward a need-based scholarship. We think that coupling a reasonable financial cap with a higher academic standard would solve the current problem. For instance, the state could award money to students who meet the SAT and GPA requirements but disqualify them if their parents make over $200,000 a year. That’s an arbitrary number, but there should come a point when the family is logically able to support our state’s bargain-priced higher education. Turning Bright Futures into a completely need-based program is unnecessary, but using a multitude of criteria seems warranted in this case.
As for those proposing that students repay their scholarship if they leave the state after graduation, where’s our reason to stay? The weather and beaches only take us so far: We need jobs. And a halfway sane governor wouldn’t hurt.
Sure, watching our grads leave the state shows the program isn’t accomplishing its original objective by keeping our best students in the state’s workforce. However, when the job market is back on the upswing, this won’t be such a problem.
In the meantime, we ask that our lawmakers make the obvious choice instead of entertaining ridiculous ideas.
