SECTION: Metro News; Pg. 1B

LENGTH: 619 words

HEADLINE: HOPE scholarships widen gap, study says

BYLINE: JAMES SALZER

SOURCE: AJC

BODY:
Merit-based scholarships like Georgia's HOPE are mostly helping students who can already afford college, a study released Monday suggests.

And they may be helping to widen the gap between the percentage of white and black students who attend college, the report by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University says.

"Merit aid programs are very popular because rewarding students for their academic work seems to be the right thing to do," said Patricia Marin, research associate at the Civil Rights Project. "While on the surface these programs seem reasonable, in reality they are not only ignoring existing needs but are actually exacerbating problems." Georgia officials disputed the findings, arguing that minority enrollment here has gone up, and that HOPE is providing an incentive for the state's high school students to get good grades.

The lottery-funded HOPE scholarship, started in 1993, has been a model for new merit-based programs across the country in recent years.

Under HOPE, students with at least a B average get free tuition, fee and book money if they attend a Georgia public college, and $3,000 a year to attend a private college.

More than 100,000 public and private college students received about $230 million worth of HOPE scholarships last school year.

But critics have long argued the program is a transfer of wealth, from poor Georgians playing the lottery to middle- and upper-income kids getting HOPE scholarships, a point noted in the research.

Using enrollment figures during the 1990s, the study reported only 4 percent of the money spent on HOPE went to students who might not otherwise have gone to college. Most of it subsidized students who would have gone to college anyway, said David Mustard, a University of Georgia economics professor whose research was cited by Harvard officials.

Because of HOPE, enrollment for youth from families with incomes above $50,000 rose 11.4 percent, but the program has had no effect on enrollment of youth from poorer families, the study showed.

In other states, like Florida, Michigan and New Mexico, the study suggested merit-based scholarships are doing little to help reduce the college-going gap between white and black students. In Michigan, for instance, 14 percent of high school graduates are African-American, but blacks received only 4 percent of the state's major merit scholarships, the study said.

Glenn Newsome, director of the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which administers HOPE, said minority enrollment has improved here. Black enrollment in Georgia public colleges has increased 18 percent since the fall of 1994. But Department of Education records show there has also been a gain in black students graduating from high school.

Nationally, researchers argue scholarships based on test scores or grades hurt minority and poor students because they generally score lower on such measurements.

The Civil Rights Project report recommends expanding the definition of "merit" to include more than one set of scores or tests. And it says there should be an income cap on recipients. For instance, when the HOPE program was started, awards went to students in families with annual incomes of $66,000 or less. However, the lottery was such a success, and the program was so popular, that the income cap was removed.

Gary Henry, a Georgia State University researcher who has studied the program since its inception, believes HOPE has provided incentive for high school kids to get good grades and, once in college, to graduate, because they are better prepared.

"It's not enough to get an entry ticket to college. You've got to stay and get a degree," Henry said.

LOAD-DATE: August 27, 2002