Across Florida, college freshmen are signing up for classes. Many are taking advantage of the Bright Futures scholarship to help pay their way.
And many are experiencing sticker shock when they see what the scholarships DON’T cover.
Students earn Bright Futures Scholarships based on their grades, test scores, and community service -- and NOT their financial need.
More than a third of Florida’s high school graduates qualified for the scholarship last year.
Forrest Estep was one of them. He's a student at Florida State.
He shows me the bill for his first semester in college.
“It shows you tuition and it just has the total amount at the end…”
In the past, his Bright Futures Scholarship would have covered a lot more. But now?
“Here’s how much you owe for the fees, here’s this class, here’s this class and it gave you a total. And then, from that total I guess is where they took the percentage from, and it was barely any, it was like not even half.”
It was a lot more than his dad, Woody Estep, was expecting to pay.
“I think that was part of what was confusing me because I thought it was going to be ‘OK, here’s your total, you get a 75% discount off your total purchase.’ No, it was 75% off one item.”
It used to be that scholarship recipients got either 75% or 100% of their tuition paid. Some other expenses were also covered.
BUT Florida lawmakers started changing the Bright Futures program a few years ago. The cost of college keeps going up. Lottery revenue helps fund the program and lottery sales are down. There's less money to spend AND more students are eligible for scholarships.
Braulio Colon with the Florida College Access Network says the problem is that the program is entirely merit-based. The Network is an underwriter of StateImpact Florida.
“Regardless of a student’s family’s ability to pay, all students qualified for it if they met the academic criteria.
Colon says that made the program unsustainable because so many students were qualifying for the award.
Also, he says many families don’t understand that paying for college involves more than just tuition.
“So if they hear something about a scholarship that pays for 75% of their tuition, many times first generation students and families interpret that as ‘oh, I’m covered because tuition is all I need to worry about.’”
And fees can make the costs double.
Bright Futures used to cover all of tuition plus up to about $300 in fees.
But starting this year, recipients will only receive a certain amount of money per credit hour, and most of their fees won’t be covered.
It’s a much smaller award than students received during the first decade of the program. Colon says the money would go farther if the state also considered an applicant’s financial need.
“We’ve always thought that there are some definite benefits to having a very popular merit based program in the state of Florida. However, a merit based program is incomplete if it doesn’t take into account a student’s ability to pay.”
But Bob Sanchez of the James Madison Institute, a non partisan research group, says the state shouldn’t abandon the merit-based system.
“Remember one of the rationales for creating the bright futures program in the first place was to avoid the brain drain where the smart kids go off to Ivy League schools or to the University of Virginia or some other school. It was to help keep them in Florida on the theory that when they graduate from college they’ll stay and work here in the professions they’ve chosen.”
Instead of making Bright Futures need-based or cutting the scholarship even more, Sanchez says lawmakers should raise the bar for applicants.