HOPE scholarship hinders diversity

When former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller initiated the HOPE scholarship in 1993, ‘keep HOPE alive’ became a household phrase. Although the merit-based scholarship was originally created to keep Georgia’s gifted students in-state, the scholarship has also made it possible for students from diverse backgrounds—that may not have otherwise been able to afford tuition—to attend Georgia’s public colleges and universities. As UGA celebrates the 50^th anniversary of its desegregation, HOPE cuts and tuition hikes may jeopardize the University’s diverse population.

“Students right now are living in a very interesting time,” said James Mooney,

Associate Director for Operations in UGA’s Office of Student Financial Aid. “We’re going into one of the most volatile financial aid years I’ve ever seen.”

With budget cuts threatening HOPE, the opportunities for many Georgia students to go to college are dwindling. Although diversity at UGA has improved since its desegregation, Juan Carlos Cardoza-Oquendo, a junior Foundation Fellow from Decatur, Ga., believes that HOPE has since segregated the University.

“It’s facilitating higher education for upper-middle class people who on average tend to be white,” he said. “The flipside of that is it’s closing the doors to lower class people who tend to be black. There are working white folks too, but it’s mostly black.”

In “Merit-Based College Scholarships and Car Sales,” UGA Terry College of Business Economics Professors Christopher Cornwell and David Mustard confirm Cardoza-Oquendo’s suspicions that HOPE mainly benefits students from upper-middle class backgrounds. According to the study, “household income is an important determinant of a high-school student's academic achievement, [thus] scholarship funding generally flows to those who would have attended college anyway.”

According to Mustard, there are three reasons that the state implemented the scholarship: access, choice, and incentive. HOPE gives access to colleges and universities to students who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford to attend, it allows students to choose to stay in Georgia, which keeps high quality students in state, and it gives students the incentive to work hard in school. When evaluating HOPE’s affect on diversity at UGA, Mustard looks at the success of HOPE’s purposes.

“The most successful purpose is choice, and we can measure that with things like SAT scores,” he said.

Mustard argued that when it comes to creating better access to education, HOPE has had little affect on helping students that would not have gone to college otherwise.

“The idea of HOPE increasing access to education is to help kids that are academically able [to attend college], but are also financially constrained,” he said. “That’s just a really small set of people. The ability [to go to college] is a bigger problem than the financing for most kids.”

For Alexis Armand, a black, working-class lesbian and former UGA student from Atlanta, Ga., adjusting to life in Athens was difficult and heavily affected her grades.

“Having come from the inner-city of Atlanta, I was not the typical UGA student so I didn’t really fit in,” she said. “I always felt out of place and awkward in my classes so I just chose not to go.”

Armand lost HOPE at the end of her freshman year and was unable to gain it back before eventually dropping out for financial reasons. Her story reaffirms Mustard’s notion that students that apply for HOPE in order to have access to Georgia’s public colleges and universities, are not as well prepared and are more likely to lose HOPE.

Armand believes that since HOPE’s implementation, it has not helped to make UGA a more diverse campus.

“The majority of the students who take advantage of HOPE are wealthy, upper-middle class suburban white kids, not kids from rural Georgia or the actual city of Atlanta,” she said. “The sad part is most of the kids [who have HOPE] can already afford to go to UGA.”

Jane Shirra, a white, middle-class student who attended high school with Armand in Atlanta, believes that HOPE does help diversity at UGA.

“I do think HOPE helps make UGA at least a little bit more diverse because it allows some people to attend that might not otherwise be able to because of economic constraints,” Shirra said.

In Cornwell and Mustard’s “The Distributional Impacts of Lottery-Funded Aid: Evidence From Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship,” however, the professors reiterate that scholarships are more likely to be awarded to households with larger incomes and that by contrast, Georgia counties with a large black population are less likely to receive merit scholarships. The study found that black enrollment rates at four-year public schools rose 21 percent between 1993 and 1997 because of HOPE, while white enrollment rates only increased by 5 percent. Yet, since black enrollment rates were much lower from the beginning, a slight increase in enrollment causes a disproportionately high percentage change.

“Although HOPE has raised the African American share of college students enrolled in Georgia institutions, it does not follow that the scholarship has created more racial diversity at the institutional level,” Cornwell and Mustard wrote. “Because African American enrollment gains have occurred primarily at less selective institutions—like historically black colleges and universities—and not at Georgia Tech and UGA, HOPE may actually increase the stratification of Georgia colleges and universities by race.”

Cardoza-Oquendo believes that a lack of support may explain why minorities and working people do not receive the HOPE as frequently as their white middle and upper-middle class peers.

“You know, maybe their parents didn’t go to college and they couldn’t show them how to apply,” he said. “If you’re the first person in your family to go to college, there’s a lot you have to figure out on your own.”

Imella Sanchez, Administrative Associate to Dr. Jack Houston, Jr. in UGA’s African Studies Institute, believes that those from less privileged backgrounds may have more problems keeping HOPE.

“Some students who receive HOPE that are first-generation college students are sometimes unable to maintain the scholarship because they come from a low-income background that is not as privileged as some of their fellow students,” she said. “They have to take on part-time jobs which in the mean time makes their grades suffer, so they might not maintain the scholarship.”

Sanchez also believes that although HOPE may be a household term for many families in Georgia, she wonders whether or not black and Latino students know that the scholarship is available.

“Maybe the reason that the number of minorities with HOPE is so low is because their high schools didn’t get the word out,” she said.

Although Cardoza-Oquendo is thankful to receive HOPE, he worries that the scholarship takes attention away from Georgia’s need for a redistribution of wealth.

“I support HOPE in that it’s a step to free public higher education for all, but I also think it might be entrenching wealth,” he said. “It mostly serves upper-middle class students and it’s not opening UGA to poor people.”