Schools to boost aid to freshmen this fall

Lawmakers cut scholarship amounts

Monday, May 13, 2013

This fall, some colleges and universities in the state plan to financially assist incoming freshmen who were to get $4,500 in state lottery-funded Academic Challenge Scholarships. They will instead get $2,000 after the Legislature decided this spring to trim the amount.

Two public four-year universities and at least four private four-year universities are planning scholarship supplemental funding.

During this year’s legislative session, an idea was quietly floated to expand gambling in Arkansas to help raise more money for scholarships, but though the idea briefly buoyed scholarship hopes, it was never introduced as a legislative measure.

This fall, the University of Central Arkansas at Conway will provide a one-time $750 to each incoming-freshman Academic Challenge Scholarship recipient, said UCA President Tom Courtway.

These freshmen won’t receive the supplemental $750 in their sophomore years, when the size of their Academic Challenge Scholarships will rise to $3,000 if they continue to qualify for the scholarship, he said.

“This year’s [high school] senior class only had about five or six months to plan for this fall since the change in the law,” Courtway said.

He said UCA had about 1,620 entering freshmen who received Academic Challenge Scholarships last fall. He estimated the cost of the $750 supplemental scholarships at roughly $1.2 million if the same number enroll this fall. The use of these funds for onetime awards will be in compliance with the state law that limits colleges to spending 20 percent of their tuition and fee revenue on academic and performance scholarships, he noted.

“We decided to provide this one-year assistance to the students and their families because we had available scholarship funds,” he said. “It seemed to be the right thing to do given the substantial [scholarship] reduction from 2012 to 2013 for entering students; and we are well below the 20 [percent] limit.”

Tuition and fees for an Arkansan taking 15 hours per semester at UCA will be $7,595 during the 2013-14 school year, Courtway said.

The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville is providing a one-time $1,000 to each incoming freshman who is receiving an Academic Challenge Scholarship and has at least a 3.3 grade-point average in high school and at least a 24 ACT score, said UA spokesman John Diamond. Each recipient of the $1,000 also must have submitted an acceptable scholarship application and not have received another scholarship, he said.

What the additional scholarship support will cost UA won’t be known until the school sees how many students enroll in the fall, but “we are prepared to cover 100 additional students on this scholarship supplement,” Diamond said.

Tuition and fees for a typical Arkansan taking 15 credits per semester at the Fayetteville campus is $7,553 in the current school year, Diamond said. On May 23, the UA System board of trustees is scheduled to set tuition and fee amounts for this fall, he said.

Officials at the state’s other public four-year universities said they don’t plan to supplement the Academic Challenge Scholarship amounts for freshmen in the coming school year.

UA-Fayetteville and UCA have the highest number of Academic Challenge Scholarship recipients in the 2012-13 school year with 5,874 and 4,123, respectively, according to the state Department of Higher Education.

Included in the four private schools that plan to aid lottery-scholarship recipients in the fall is Hendrix College in Conway. It is providing a one-time $2,000 to first-year lottery-scholarship recipients, said college spokesman Frank Cox. Tuition and fees at the college are $37,816 in the coming school year, he said.

Philander Smith College is giving $2,500 to first-time lottery-scholarship recipients, said Shareese Kondo, a spokesman for the Little Rock college. Tuition at the college will cost $11,804 in the coming school year, she said.

Williams Baptist College in Walnut Ridge is providing $1,000 merit scholarships to lottery-scholarship freshmen in the coming school year, said Brett Cooper, vice president of institutional advancement for the college. Tuition and fees are $13,850 in the current school year, according to the college’s website.

The University of the Ozarks doesn’t have an across-the-board supplemental support package for Academic Challenge Scholarship recipients, but its financial aid office has reallocated scholarship and other financial aid funds to help incoming students who are most in need, said Larry Isch, a spokesman for the university. “In some cases, we are able to provide an additional $2,500, which would put them at last year’s Academic Challenge Scholarship level of $4,500,” he said.

The University of the Ozark’s tuition and fees will be $24,350 in this fall, Isch said.

Officials for several of the state’s private universities didn’t respond to questions about their financial-aid programs.

There are about 33,000lottery-scholarship recipients receiving a total of about $133 million this school year, said Shane Broadway, interim director of the state Department of Higher Education. More than 23,000 of them attend four-year public universities.

Harold Criswell, associate director for the department, said he expects about 36,000 scholarship recipients to receive a total of $113 million in the coming school year.

June 1 is the scholarship application deadline. So far, the department has received 17,365 applications, which is 70 more than it had at the same time last year, he said.

In February, the Legislature and Gov. Mike Beebe passed Act 235 to overhaul the Academic Challenge Scholarship for future recipients. Key lawmakers said the changes were necessary because more students than expected had received scholarships and the lottery’s net proceeds had failed to meet projections.

The state lottery began selling tickets on Sept. 28, 2009. It raised $82 million for scholarships in about nine months that fiscal year. It raised $94.2 million in fiscal 2011 and $97.5 million in fiscal 2012. In the first nine months of fiscal 2013, it raised $67.1 million.

In the coming school year, first-time recipients of the scholarship will get $2,000 as freshmen, $3,000 as sophomores, $4,000 as juniors and $5,000 as seniors at four-year universities under Act 235.

New scholarship recipients at two-year colleges will each get $2,000 a year for both years.

Students who were first awarded the scholarships in the 2010-11 school year each will continue to receive $5,000 a year to attend Arkansas universities and $2,500 a year to attend community and technical colleges. Those who were first awarded the scholarships in the 2011-12 or 2012-13 school years each will continue to get $4,500 a year at universities and $2,250 at colleges.

In recent months, officials have been looking for ways to make up for the lag in lottery revenue. A proposal to supplement the lottery with income generated by casinos was talked about and quickly discarded.

Arkansas State University System President Charles Welch told the chiefs of the state’s four-year public universities in an e-mail dated Feb. 12 that they would have an opportunity to increase the scholarship amounts “if the movement to allow casino gambling that Senator [Larry Teague] discussed … results in 18 [percent] of casino revenues going toward lottery scholarships in the future.”

Teague, a Democrat from Nashville who is co-chairman of the Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, said that early in the legislative session he heard about the casino-gambling idea from a lobbyist, whom he declined to identify. “Then it kind of went away,” he said, adding that he opposed the idea.

No lawmaker during the session proposed a constitutional amendment to authorize casino gambling to raise money for scholarships.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/13/2013