Georgia Scholarships Grant Poor Recipients Hope for Brighter Future

When Beatrice Thompson earned her GED last spring, the state of Georgia sent her a $500 voucher for college. She tore open the mail and cried, right there outside the rundown trailer she shares with her family.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Thompson worked at dead-end factory jobs. That life was no life, she says: “Your mind is just wasting away.” At 43, she is now studying to become a licensed practical nurse.

Since 1993, Georgia has given students like Thompson nearly a billion dollars in scholarships simply for earning decent grades in high school. Even those who earn high school equivalency degrees get a boost toward more education, as Thompson discovered.

The largess comes from a program called HOPE, Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally. Funded by a state lottery, it pays for college or technical training. To date, 437,514 Georgians have received $943 million in tuition for schools in the state. Slightly more than half attended colleges; the rest studied at technical institutes.

It is a turnabout for a state once tarred as an educational backwater; the 1990 census found 29% of Georgians over 25 never finished high school. Now Georgia advertises its work force in the New York Times: “We’re ready. How about you?”

Former Gov. Zell Miller created HOPE--inspired by and grateful for the GI bill that helped him. After the Marines discharged Miller in 1956, the federal grant paid for his college degree. An impoverished son of the north Georgia mountains, he became a history teacher and, later, Democratic governor.

The goal of the GI bill stuck with him: The government rewarded his military service with an education. Why not also reward students for good grades?

The HOPE program has drawbacks: Many recipients fail to keep the scholarships. And it has critics: Some argue that money goes to those who don’t need it. Others say the program drives up school fees. And its sole source of funding--lottery tickets--doesn’t sit well with some Georgians.

Still, it’s a popular idea.

Variations such as Missouri’s “Bright Flight” and Texas’ “Toward EXcellence, Access & Success” exist in 17 other states, and at least five more--including California--are considering similar programs. The Clinton administration borrowed the word for its Hope and Lifetime Learning tax credit for tuition and fees.

HOPE may reach deepest in disadvantaged places like Greene County, most of whose 14,000 inhabitants occupy an economically bleak spot two hours east of Atlanta. Per capita income hovers at $18,000, three-quarters of income statewide. So many county children qualify for free or cut-price meals that everyone gets free breakfast and lunch at public schools.

By national standards, higher education in Georgia is a good deal. Undergraduate tuition and fees at Georgia universities averaged $2,930 for residents during 1998-99, the latest figure available. That’s well below the national average of $3,686. But for many in Greene County, it’s a fortune.

The county’s biggest employer is Chipman-Union, with two factories making men’s socks. Despite an influx of retirees and weekenders since the 1980s, locals say their prospects have barely improved. Promising more jobs, a $100-million golf resort run by Ritz-Carlton is due to open next year.

But many count on HOPE. The program has spent $1.2 million to send 324 county residents to college, 220 to technical courses. HOPE pays tuition, fees and a book stipend at a state college or university, or $3,000 for each year at a private college in Georgia.

One of Greene County’s current HOPE scholars is Brandi Dingler, the daughter of teenage dropouts. Modest family finances left her on her own at the University of Georgia, 30 miles north in Athens. Yet she now has enough time and resources to relish a spring break outing to an animal preserve.

She proudly notes how her mother, now 36, also born and reared in Greene County, has acquired a GED and, with HOPE, even more. The morning after Dingler’s high school graduation, her mother received an associate degree from Georgia Military College. “If I lost HOPE, I don’t know what I’d do,” the 20-year-old says.

Jordan Byce, who graduated from Greensboro’s high school last year, now attends the University of Georgia. As valedictorian, he more than qualified; the scholarship requires a B average in core courses.

Without HOPE, “we would probably have to . . . borrow money and really sacrifice,” says his mother, Pam, a teacher at Greene-Taliaferro Comprehensive, where her son and Dingler graduated. “Sometimes middle-class people are the ones caught without.”

Jackie Dunn, long divorced and rearing four kids, knows. At Chipman-Union for 26 years, she earns about $10 an hour bundling pairs of socks and attaching plastic hooks.

After paying one son’s way through a technical institute, Dunn gladly relied on HOPE money to educate her daughters. One is a practical nurse; the other is studying to be a radiologist.

“I keep the faith,” Dunn explains. And, with HOPE, she now keeps more of her wages, putting money into her house and small luxuries like hamburger when she likes. She herself may pursue a degree in physical therapy.

Art Redding, a division plant manager, works at Chipman-Union in Greensboro. When his daughter, Sarah, enrolled at Georgia Southern University, he was thrilled that HOPE picked up the tab.

But when her grades fell below the required 3.0 GPA, Redding shrugged off the loss of her scholarship as normal for a freshman year. He turned to his savings from years of stock investments.

Like Sarah, many college recipients of HOPE lose the scholarship: Only 36% of 1997 HOPE freshmen came back as HOPE sophomores, according to the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which administers the scholarships.

But research by the independent Council for School Performance at Georgia State University shows that, like Sarah, a higher proportion of those who lost a HOPE scholarship find a way to pay and stay in college than those who never had the scholarship.

Jaime Courtney lasted less than two years at Georgia College & State University. Demanding course work--and partying--sent her grades spiraling. Now 23, she works at her grandparents’ dry-cleaning store off Greensboro’s Main Street.

She calls herself “smart,” not “smart smart,” but wiser. Of HOPE, she says: “It did everything for me. It got me started.” Now she thinks about technical school and computer training.

HOPE undergoes constant fine-tuning. In March, for example, the state Legislature stopped requiring recipients of federal Pell Grants to spend that money on tuition and sacrifice support from HOPE. With that change, about 19,000 low-income Georgians can use the Pell for living expenses.

Critics complain that HOPE takes the wages of lower-income people to educate students who don’t need the money. In January, a report by the American Assn. of State Colleges and Universities called such programs, HOPE included, inefficient. Providing college free to all, regardless of income, comes at a price, says Travis Reindl, the report’s author.

But Art Redding, the Chipman-Union manager, voices a defense frequently heard in Georgia: “I don’t think children ought to be penalized for a job well done in high school because their parents have a certain income.”

Fees at some Georgia state schools have risen steeply since HOPE started, critics also note. Earlier this year, Gov. Roy Barnes accused administrators of tapping HOPE as “easy money” and threatened to cut fee support.

Jimmy Stokes, the principal at Greensboro’s high school, worries more about the inflated expectations among the school’s 725 students. Not all B students are college material, he says.

In Greene County, easier access to college can also be bittersweet. New college graduates may stay in the state, but not in the county.

“There’s been a discernible brain drain from the community,” says Roi Johnson, Chipman-Union’s vice president for human resources. “They get the boost up with the HOPE dollars. That’s good. But we’re waving goodbye.”

That wasn’t Zell Miller’s concern. Miller, who retired from politics last year and now teaches at the University of Georgia, says: “I wanted the question to be not whether to go to college, but where to go to college.”

Miller’s sentiments echo throughout Greene County. “Attaining the HOPE scholarship puts you on par, irrespective of economic class,” says Chipman-Union’s Johnson. “It makes us all one, the same.”

It also plays out family by family, generation by generation.

Beatrice Thompson wants to alter the course of her family’s history. All five of her children are dropouts, as was she, as was her mother.

Thompson offers them her wasted years as a bitter example. “I hope it’ll make my children take a look at their lives,” she says, and “what they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives.”

Her 20-year-old son, Jason, just earned his GED. He’s talked about more school, to become an electrician.

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On the Net: Georgia Student Finance Commission runs HOPE:

https://www.gsfc.org

Research on HOPE: Georgia Council for School Performance:

https://cspweb.gsu.edu/csp

Study of merit-based scholarships:

https://www.aascu.org/analysis/exsum.pdf

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Georgia Facts and Figures:

https://www.gafacts.net