Good Grades Mean Cold Cash for Kentucky Students

Talk about senioritis.

Eighteen-year-old Brendon Eriscoe has already been accepted to five colleges. He’s already picked out a major--engineering. And, thanks to a career education program, he’s spending two hours a day shadowing engineers around their jobs.

All of that adds up to one very directed student.

And one high school senior who couldn’t care less about honors English.

So for the first time, Eriscoe is staring at the prospect of a D on his transcript. Afflicted by the I’m-already-into-college-so-who-gives-a-hoot syndrome known as senioritis, he’s tempted to let it slide. But he can’t. Not with money riding on his grades.

As Eriscoe well knows, if he can pull his GPA up to a 4.0, he’ll earn a $500-a-year scholarship to the Kentucky college of his choice. And so he’s toting a beat-up copy of Elie Weisel’s “Night” around with him everywhere and “trying,” he says earnestly, “to make myself get into it.”

That’s exactly what the Kentucky Educational Excellence Scholarships are designed to do.

The new program, known as KEES, pays high school students for good grades starting their freshman year. There are bonuses for standardized test scores too. By graduation, students can have earned up to $2,500 in scholarships that can be used at any Kentucky college--two-year or four-year, public or private, vocational or academic. As long as they keep their grades up in college, the scholarship is renewed every year.

For the best students, KEES offers nearly a free ride to schools like the University of Kentucky, where annual tuition runs close to $3,000. And because KEES pays for grades on a sliding scale, even C students can earn grants that cover a significant chunk of tuition at community colleges.

“This is the easiest scholarship you can get,” said Matt Easter, a junior at Dunbar High School here in the rolling hills of bluegrass country.

Indeed, most of the scholarships posted on Dunbar’s bulletin board require essays, resumes, transcripts and letters of recommendation. Some are open only to specific groups: Latinos, or aspiring astronomers, or students whose parents own small businesses.

KEES, in contrast, is universal and automatic. Every student who makes at least a 2.5 GPA receives a letter over the summer stating how much he or she has earned. The grant can be used to pay for tuition, fees or books. And it’s open to rich and poor alike, regardless of how many other grants or loans they receive.

“You really don’t have to do anything but make good grades,” marveled Drew Gilliam, a senior who said he needs “all the money I can get” for college.

Funded by the state lottery, KEES aims to turn around Kentucky’s “long history of low educational attainment,” said Roger Sugarman of the state’s Council on Post-Secondary Education. Only half of high school graduates in Kentucky go directly to college, compared with 67% in the U.S. as a whole.

“It’s largely a cultural history,” Sugarman said. “For years and years, all you needed to earn a living here was to be a coal miner or to farm tobacco. That’s no longer true.”

By prompting high school students to start thinking about college from Day 1, the KEES program aims to make higher education seem as automatic and nonnegotiable as 10th-grade algebra. And by requiring students to use their scholarships in Kentucky, Gov. Paul E. Patton hopes to keep top prospects loyal to the state.

KEES might also boost Kentucky’s standardized test scores. The state has long dragged behind the national average on the American College Test. But several seniors at Dunbar High with mediocre ACTs said they planned to take the test again--and study harder, this time--in order to bump up their scholarships, even if their original scores were good enough to get them into college.

Advertised in movie previews, on the radio and during televised University of Kentucky basketball games, KEES is modeled after a program Georgia launched in 1993. Several other states also have copied Georgia in recent years, including Florida, Maryland, Louisiana and South Carolina. Kentucky’s program is the most ambitious because the grants go even to C-students and can be used at private as well as public colleges.

Although merit-based grant programs are all the rage across the South, Georgia’s HOPE scholarship is the only one that’s been around long enough to have compiled a track record. In the six years since it was launched, officials say, more students have been making the B-averages needed to get college aid.

But are those grades earned, or wheedled?

Detractors fear these programs may spur grade inflation both in high school and in college. As Jacqueline King of the American Council on Education put it: “Is every kid going to go crying to his professor, saying, ‘You have to give me a B or I’ll lose my scholarship’? “

Some critics also worry that the grants will go mainly to affluent kids from well-educated families, while poorer students--who may face more barriers to maintaining strong grades--lose out. “Giving scarce financial aid resources to people who do not need them is wasteful, unnecessary, unproductive and comes at the price of . . . aid for others who could not afford to attend college without [it],” Thomas Mortenson, an independent educational policy analyst, wrote in a newsletter on the topic.

To address that concern, Kentucky law requires 55% of the scholarship funds generated by the lottery to go to students who truly need financial aid. The rest will be awarded to those with good grades. All told, the state will spend $150 million a year by the time the program swings into full gear in 2005.

Back at Dunbar High, head guidance counselor Tava Clay is working hard to cure Eriscoe of his senioritis--even if only for the sake of the scholarship. He clutches his copy of “Night” and promises to try harder.

The motivation may be mercenary, but Clay is sure the discipline Eriscoe learns will pay off--not just for him, but for all Kentucky. And that’s exactly what KEES is about, she says: building better students to build a better state.

“Kentucky’s investment in these students will help our state,” she said. Then she sighed, the sigh of a parent who has paid far too many tuition bills. “I’m just sorry,” she said, “that all three of my children are already in college.”