Atomic City Talk

Finally, the Legislature came to a compromise yesterday on revising the GPA required for college students to keep the lottery scholarship. They settled for a 2.75 cumulative GPA through the junior year, with a 3.0 required for each semester thereafter.

That's a reasonable standard. The problem with raising the cumulative requirement in the third and fourth years is simply that it's mathematically very difficult to raise the cumulative at that point. This allows for some mistakes earlier, but does create a way to recover.

I don't quite understand why they left this issue for the very last day of session two years in a row, but it's done now.

I think I am correct in assuming that this was the first group of graduates from the lottery scholarship. What percentage graduated and what percentage lost their scholarship due to poor grades or attendance? Is this information available?

What I've been hearing from the State is that 60% of the students lost their scholarships. I don't know how many of those had to drop out for financial reasons after losing the scholarship, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a significant number. Probably many more have had to cut back to going to school part-time, in order to earn enough to continue.

The new standard is still respectable, and I do think that it will help achieve the goal of bringing up the education level of our state's population.