The Arkansas Blog is reporting that Gov. Beebe will make more money available for scholarships:
“After receiving previously unreleased figures from the Arkansas Lottery Commission about available scholarship monies, Governor Mike Beebe has asked the Arkansas Department of Higher Education to fund an additional $5.9 million in lottery scholarships….
The additional funding will provide scholarships for the approximately 400 students remaining on the two-year institution waiting list, and for nearly 1,000 students on the four-year institution waiting list.”
This is good news for some. And Beebe should be commended for acting swiftly.
But thousands of people in the non-traditional category still won’t get scholarships. And, unfortunately, it seems like the poorly constructed decision-rules for allocating scholarships had the effect of denying funds to thousands of students who were academically deserving. Simply by looking at the numbers (30,000-ish non-traditional students denied for lack of funds in their category) anyone can discern that the bar had to be set extremely high for “non-traditional” students, while students in the other two categories were completely funded.
In the end, sitting out a semester, or simply taking classes part-time for a single semester, was enough to deny scholarships to A students while doling them out to C students. Someone ought to be held accountable for that blunder.
The numbers are still unclear. I think that, based upon the numbers cited in the original press release (see my earlier post here) and the numbers cited in the Dem-Gaz (article here), it sounds like around 30,000 students who qualified in the non-traditional category were not initially funded. Max Brantley (informed by Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample) thinks this number is much lower, because many of the 30,000 weren’t eligible anyway. He thinks only around 4,000 who qualified were left unfunded.
I hope he’s right, but I’m skeptical.
You would think the ADHE could manage a straightforward press release. If only 4,000 qualified applicants were denied (as opposed to 30,000!), doesn’t it seem like that’s a bit of information they would want to disseminate sooner than later?
Again, here is how they put it:
State Triples Academic Challenge Scholarships We had 54,533 applications
A total of 25,445 students will receive the Academic Challenge scholarships next year…
There are 4 types of student receiving funding:
4,906 are students who were awarded the Academic challenge in previous years.
12,389 traditional students have been offered the award
Of the 36,697 nontraditional students:
4,550 met the Current achiever definition and were offered the scholarship
3,600 will be offered the Nontraditional scholarship.
About 30,000 students will not be funded”
The Dem -Gaz said:
“The “nontraditional” category is for students who have not been in college continuously or are starting college some years after graduating from high school. About 36,000 applied in that category, but only 3,600 were offered scholarships.”
I expect someone will get it figured out eventually.
