The change would reduce the eligibility grade point average from 3.0 to 2.0, state officials said. The House bill was passed overwhelmingly earlier this month in the Georgia State Assembly. The state Senate is reviewing the proposed change.
The Hope Grant program is funded by the Georgia Lottery, which has lost revenue during the recession.
Lawmakers had hoped that increasing the grade point average of its technical college students in 2011 would stabilize funding for the program. But the change resulted in some “unintended consequences” for nontraditional students seeking new skills at technical colleges, said Mike Light, spokesman for the Technical College System of Georgia. “It hurt our students pretty bad,” he said.
Nearly 42,000 students who had been receiving the Hope grants didn’t return to technical colleges, one year after the grade point eligibility was changed to a 3.0, Light said. Students said they couldn’t afford to come back to school without the grants, or they didn’t come back because they feared that they wouldn’t be able to earn a 3.0 grade point average. The change put pressure on a population of students who are likely to have families, mortgages and other responsibilities, Light said.
The proposal to return to the 2.0 grade point average was supported by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and a bipartisan group of lawmakers. Rep. Charles Gregory, a Republican, was the only member of the house to vote against the change. He was unavailable to comment on this story.
It boiled down to dollars and cents and fewer workers in the pipeline for future employment.
