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Academic Merit

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Who displays more academic merit? (Who's the better investment?)
A High School Graduate with a 2.5 GPA 17%  17%  [ 1 ]
A working adult taking a ¾ college class load with a 3.8 GPA 67%  67%  [ 4 ]
Oh look, SHEEP! I mean DEATHCLAWS!! !! AAARRRRGGGGHHH! MY RIBCAGE!! !! 17%  17%  [ 1 ]
Total votes : 6

GoonSquad
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14 Aug 2010, 12:28 pm

Lottery Scholarship Clusterf**k!<-click it!

Arkansas' new lottery scholarship requires a 2.5 GPA to get a $5000.00/year check for high school grads but rejects current adult students with a 4.0...

Quote:
There was no funding cap for "traditional students" or freshmen.
All 12,389 who applied were approved.

Next, were "current achievers"; students who have continuously enrolled in college since high school.

4,550 applicants received part of the $41 million budgeted.

There's still money left for up to 5,000 more.

And finally, "non traditional students", those are basically everyone else who applied.

Only 10 percent of 36,697 applicants received the $12 million in this category.


In spite of the fact that there's money for 5000 more scholarships, the state refuses to award them to "nontraditional" students.

Quote:
"I met all the qualifications and early on it sounded to me and to a lot of other people, evidently, that anybody who qualified was going to receive an award," said Stracener.

But even with a 3.9 grade point average, a near perfect ACT score and a major in engineering and math, Stracener was denied.



:?


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visagrunt
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16 Aug 2010, 2:52 pm

What's the public policy objective of the program? If the policy is focussed on so-called, "traditional," learners then there is no basis to move outside of this framework to fund adult learners.

Are there other funding sources for adult learners? For example, job retraining programs will provide support to adult learners returning to the education system. So extension of this program could lead to double funding.

Also, consider the scope. 16,939 students are identified as having applied and bee funded in the first two categories, whereas there are over 36,000 in the third category. Clearly there is insufficient money to fund all applicants, so do you build policy fences to ensure full funding to a smaller category? Do you drop funding and fund all applicants at a mediocre level? Do you fully fund on a, "first come, first served" basis?

It is very easy to criticize public policy on the basis of anecdotal evidence, but it is rather more difficult to step back and examine what the policy was intended to achieve and whether the program as a reasonable implementation of that policy.


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