Enough Complaining About Changes to Florida’s Bright Futures Scholarship!

Proposed changes to Florida’s Bright  Futures scholarship – a merit scholarship that covers either 75% or 100% of tuition only, are annoying.  Here’s why.

A Florida Senate proposal would lift standards for a partial scholarship as follows:  3.0 GPA  and 970 SAT (or 20 ACT) to 3.0 GPA and 1050 SAT.

The full merit scholarship standards would go from a 3.5 GPA and 1270 SAT (28 ACT) to 3.5 and 1290 (or 29 ACT).

Critics claim the changes would have a “disproportionate impact” on Florida’s low-income families.

While it’s undeniably true that low-income students don’t test as well as their more affluent competition, that’s not the point. It’s time for a reality check.

Florida’s Bright Futures Scholarship was designed to keep the best and brightest students home in Florida – by making it easy to send them to Florida’s public universities, get educated and then use their knowledge to contribute to the local economy.  Particularly in the “STEM” disciplines – Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.

However, reality is far from the ideal.

STEM courses are so tough that many Bright Futures students dropped them, because they need a minimum 3.0 GPA to maintain the scholarship, according to a 2008 study by Professor Shouping  Hu of Florida State University’s College of Education.

You don’t need to show outstanding performance to qualify for this merit scholarship – the national average for SAT scores is 1,000.  You need only a 970 to qualify.  So if you’re a Florida high school student, you can be literally below average and still “earn” a merit scholarship courtesy of Bright Futures!

This is horrible public policy – Florida’s lawmakers have legislated that less than average students can qualify for “merit” money!

To me, this is like the end of every youth sports season when the entire league gets a trophy.  Not for winning – just for showing up.  Yay.

This may not make me popular, but I don’t “buy” the criticism about minorities’ disadvantages.  Our country is a nation of minorities, many of which have bootstrapped themselves, overcoming daunting barriers such as skin color, religious background and language comprehension to achieve greatness.

A recent example is the Asian-American community – about twenty years ago, admissions officers from highly-competitive colleges practically tripped over each other to admit qualified students in order to diversify their colleges’ student bodies.   As is the case with most selective colleges, they allowed Asian-American students entry despite lower than average standardized test scores, because their desirable ethnicity counter-balanced these shortcomings.

Now we’ve come full circle – Asian American students’ test scores are discounted – they’re scoring so well on these tests that admissions officers expect it from them.  This is just a simplified example, but a perfect score by an Asian-American kid might count the same as a 95% percentile score from another student.

Perhaps the biggest confusion surrounds the financial aid that is available to disadvantaged students.  There happens to be a TON of money out there for needy students – billions, in fact. It’s in the Federal Financial Aid system and in the endowments of the colleges themselves.

But this is money is not merit-based.  The vast majority of it is given out on a need-based analysis, according to the financial formulas of the Department of Education and the colleges themselves.

There are several hundred, maybe more than one thousand colleges in the country that meet 90% or more of a student’s financial need.  Many are accessible for students with average or slightly better-than-average performance on the SAT or ACT.  Some don’t even look at performance on standardized tests.

I’d like to see the discussion shift to how to use the Federal Financial Aid system to fund a college education.  Quit whining about the death of Bright Futures – it’s not productive.  Not only is it unsustainable financially – we’re million short according to a recent Miami Herald article – but it’s a bad message – we reward below average students.

Something’s gotta give.

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