LITTLE ROCK — Tens of thousands of applicants for lottery-funded scholarships are still waiting to hear whether they’ll receive the awards, a month before classes start at the state’s public universities.
By Friday, just 11,661 of 53,511 applicants for the Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship had been notified about whether they would receive scholarships. All of those notified were traditional students, recent high school graduates who plan to attend college in the fall.
The Department of Higher Education has hired temporary workers and borrowed employees from other state agencies to review the applications and unclog the backlog of requests, officials said Friday.
The department originally had three scholarshipapplication reviewers, but the transfers and temporary hiring have increased that to 40, and the department plans to add 20 more temporary employees, some of whom will help train still more borrowed workers.
The decision to step up the staffing came after discussions involving the department and Gov. Mike Beebe’s office, Beebe spokesman Matt DeCample said.
Each award consists of up to $5,000 per academic year for an Arkansas student attending an in-state public two- and four-year college. This is the first year the scholarships are being offered.
The crush of applicants “is unique and due to theonset of these scholarships,” DeCample said. “I don’t think it will ever be a crush of this size, when you have 50,000 applications coming at once.”
Department of Higher Education Director Jim Purcell said workers hoped to notify all applicants about their eligibility by Aug. 10.
That would make for a tight timeline for students waiting to hear before deciding whether to attend college in the fall semester.
Fall classes start Aug. 19 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Aug. 23 at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and Arkansas State University at Jonesboro; and Aug. 26 at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
“We did the math, and we determined that we really needed to spike up our efforts a bit,” Purcell said of processing the applications.
In 2008, state voters approved the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery. Applications for this, the first year of the scholarships, were due by June 1 of this year, and the state received 40,000 more applications than it received in previous years.
An estimated $125 million will be available for the scholarships. At least $12 million of that will be for nontraditional students - those who are not attending college in the semester immediately after graduating from high school.
Another $41.5 million is designated for “current achievers,” those who are now enrolled in colleges.
The remaining funding will go to traditional students.
The Higher Education Department expects to spend no more than $80,000 on temporary staffing, which will be paid out of lottery funds, Purcell said. The department will ask for additional funding for temporary staffing in the next legislative session, he said.
Nine staff members from the state Department of Education were trained to process the applications Friday morning. Other state departments are lending computers andoffice space for the effort.
Through a memorandum of agreement, workers on loan from other departments will be paid out of those departments’ budgets, Purcell said.
Scholarship eligibility requirements for traditional students include completion of the state’s Smart Core curriculum and either a 2.5 high school grade-point average or a 19 on the ACT.
“People coming out of high school should have a pretty good idea if they qualify or not,” financial aid coordinator Tara Smith said. “Even those who haven’t received notification yet, they should know.”
She said that for most of the 5,000 traditional students who have not yet been notified, the lag is because their applications are being reviewed for accuracy.
Also, because the number of nontraditional and “current achiever” applicants exceeded the funding available, the staff must first prioritize those requests before determining who will receive awards.
Those applications are prioritized according to progress toward degree, grade-point average and fields of study in areas deemed critical, such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The staff must process the applications manually, matching data from transcripts and the information on the applications, Purcell said.
“It’s very labor-intensive,”he said. “Sometimes we’re dealing with multiple transcripts from the same person, and we have to do extra calculations.”
Progress toward a degree makes up 70 percent of the criteria for prioritizing applications for “current achiever” students, so the more credit hours a student has the more likely he is to soon be notified about his scholarship, Smith said. Notifications for senior college students should start by the end of next week.
State Rep. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, arranged April forums with scholarship representatives in Northwest Arkansas after his constituents complained that the process was confusing.
As graduating seniors have been notified of their awards, however, those frustrations have eased, he said.
“I think the [Department of Higher Education] is just overwhelmed with the paperwork and getting it all out,” Lindsey said.
“The current achievers, the ones that are enrolled, are the ones that are most at risk for not getting it. There are a few that are saying ‘I need to know. I don’t know when I’ll know because of the backlog,’” he said.
The delay in processing is more of a concern for graduating high school seniors because many will rely on that aid to decide whether to attend college, Lindsey said. Most “current achiever” applicants will attend regardless and will restructure their financial-aid packages if they receive the scholarships, he said.
“They’ve got other options,” Lindsey said. “They know they’re going back.”
Purcell said the department expects the award process to be smoother in coming years as the public grows more familiar with the guidelines, and software and staffing systems are perfected.
The staff has also been overwhelmed by phone calls from applicants curious about their scholarship status, he said.
“I understand they’re wanting to call and have a conversation,” Purcell said. “I understand there’s anxiety out there, but there’s anxiety in here.” Information for this article was contributed by Cynthia Howell of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/24/2010