UGA can celebrate the glass-half-full news that minority enrollment is up while enrollment of African-American students remains stubbornly low. Asian enrollment has doubled and Hispanic enrollment quadrupled since 1994, while African-American student numbers have managed a meager gain to only 8.1% from 6.8% percent over the same twenty-year span (Athens Banner Herald, February 16, 2015).
The reasons offered for this persistently-low representation of African-American students include the appeal of an urban Atlanta setting, or a preference to matriculate at a historical black college or university. Those might be valid, but Lee Shearer offers one significant fact buried in an assumption: "UGA has grown less diverse geographically over the years as well, simply because of Atlanta’s growth. Nearly two-thirds of Georgia’s in-state students came from one of the 20 metro Atlanta counties this fall." But is this shift due only to Atlanta's growth?
No doubt UGA is close enough to drive home to Atlanta to do laundry, but this shift to a metro student population could have been (and was) predicted when Governor Deal pushed through the Zell Miller Scholarship and resultant HOPE Lite. After the two-tier HOPE became law, OnlineAthens recounted, "Black students, students from rural areas and students from low-income families will also be less likely to enroll at UGA, predicted Bob Schaeffer [public education director for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing] and UGA demographer Doug Bachtel" ( Athens Banner-Herald, January 29, 2012).
Where HOPE once covered all tuition, mandatory fees, and a modest book allowance, this year HOPE will cover only 62% of UGA tuition [GBPI]. That cost may be well more than HOPE-eligible students in rural Georgia, white and black, can bear to afford.
Transparency on the part of the Governor's office would do much to resolve the questions of the disparate and ongoing impact of having a two-tiered HOPE program. Through Open Records requests and a painstaking review of various data, the AJC in February 2012 showed that students in six metro counties collected over 50% of the Zell Miller funds despite those counties comprising only one-third of the state's students.
At one time, the website of the Georgia Student Finance Commission provided a nominal amount of information on the program, mainly annual summaries of HOPE scholarships and HOPE grants awarded with the total amount funded for that year. That page provided campaign fodder against Governor Deal as a record of a reduction in HOPE funding during his tenure, and not-so-curiously that page [http://www.gsfc.org/gsfcnew/SandG_facts.cfm ] is no longer accessible. [The Internet Wayback Machine, however, has a copy].
The new awards history page provides only a running total of all scholarships awarded. One can view totals by school or county, but with one caveat: "Figures in these reports include awards made for the HOPE Scholarship, HOPE Grant and HOPE GED programs and do not include the Zell Miller Scholarship or Strategic Industries Workforce Investment Grant." Nothing is provided that could show annual trends or the disparate impacts of two-tier HOPE on rural Georgia.
UGA will do well to continue to monitor the enrollment and graduation rates of minority students, and, absent a legislative commitment to provide full tuition credit for deserving students across the state, our state (rural and metro) will be better served if our legislators provided for clear documentation on the impact of the changes they made in the HOPE scholarship program.
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