Tennessee: Challenged by HOPE

Twenty-one year old Daniel Wroe got his HOPE scholarship the same way most high schoolers do: a B average and decent test scores.

“It was something I was counting on to be able to pay for school,” he said. “It is not incredibly hard to get. You don’t even have to be above average.”

Instead of going to college out of state, the Jonesborough, Tenn., native enrolled at UTC, where he had big plans to major in art and graduate with little to no debt.

There was just one problem: freshman math. He finished the class with a D. His GPA plummeted, and his scholarship was gone.

Since then Mr. Wroe, like many who lose the HOPE scholarship, has accumulated thousands of dollars of debt to attend school.

Like the lottery scholarships in neighboring Georgia, the Tennessee HOPE scholarship, implemented in 2004 and funded by the Tennessee Education Lottery, has brought a wave of changes to both K-12 and higher education in the state.

At the five-year anniversary of HOPE, more Tennessee high schoolers are choosing to attend state institutions and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville is becoming much more selective, according to officials.

Yet at the same time, the number of students graduating with college degrees in Tennessee is not increasing, and most students who receive a HOPE scholarship lose it by the time they graduate.

About half of HOPE recipients lose the scholarship after their first year and, by their third year, two-thirds no longer are eligible, said David Wright, associate executive director of policy, planning and research at the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

Janelle Malone, a 20-year-old junior majoring in English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, lost her HOPE scholarship freshman year because, like many students, she was overwhelmed by the freedoms of college and wasn’t disciplined.

“My priorities were all messed up,” she said. “I would rather hang out with my friends than go study.”

Some students such as Ms. Malone, who now has several loans to pay for school, admit they lost their scholarship because they were irresponsible. Others were not prepared for the challenge of college coursework, said Mitch Kilgore, a 21-year-old junior accounting major at UTC who has kept his HOPE scholarship.

Mr. Kilgore said most of his friends have lost their scholarship and keeping his own has been difficult.

“A lot of people lost it because they thought college was going to be like high school,” he said.

students unprepared

Poor retention rates in the HOPE scholarship have revealed a deficiency at all levels of education, officials said.

“They weren’t significantly prepared for what they needed to be college ready,” said Mary Jo Howland, deputy executive director of the Tennessee Board of Education.

She said HOPE scholarship retention levels shed light on serious testing and curriculum issues at the high school level.

Unlike some states with lottery scholarships, Tennessee does not require students to complete specific coursework to be eligible for the HOPE. Some Tennessee high schoolers avoided more difficult classes during their junior and seniors years to ensure their eligibility for the scholarship, Mr. Wright said. Schools did not require students to take such courses as physics or pre-calculus, so they didn’t.

While low state curriculum requirements were hurting high schoolers’ chances of excelling in college, state assessment tests were not identifying poor performance, said Dr. Howland.

A 2005 comparison of eighth-graders’ performance on the Tennessee state assessment test and the National Assessment of Education Progress showed a troubling gap between state and national standards, Dr. Howland said. Tennessee eighth-graders who achieved an average of 87 percent reading proficiency on the state assessment achieved only a 26 percent proficiency on the NAEP.

“State proficiency and national proficiency was way off,” she said.

In 2009, schools will offer an improved state assessment test to students, more in line with national testing standards. Next year, entering ninth-graders also will be required to take four math classes, including high-level math, before graduation, along with three science classes, including either physics or chemistry.

Kirk Kelly, director of testing and accountability at Hamilton County Schools, said the ACT will be given to all Hamilton County 11th-graders for the first time next year, which could help teachers measure college readiness.

For the last two years Hamilton County schools have administered versions of the ACT test — Explore in the 8th grade and Plan in the 10th grade — to assess student performance by national standards and get them ready for the ACT, he said.

Dr. Kelly said students should have been taking higher level math and science classes and not skipping math courses their senior year. But universities also can do more to help college students struggling to keep their scholarship, he said.

“The HOPE scholarship has increased the emphasis on college readiness,” Dr. Kelly said. “We still have some work to do in terms of our rigor and curriculum.”

A bill passed last spring by the Tennessee Legislature could affect the scholarship retention of incoming classes. In the past, students were required to maintain a cumulative GPA of 3.O after freshman year, said Tim Phelps, associate executive director for grant and scholarship programs at the Tennessee Student Assistance Corp.

Those rules were loosened to allow students to hold a 2.75 cumulative GPA through their second year of school. After the students have achieved 72 credit hours, they must have over a 2.75 cumulative GPA and a semester GPA of 3.0, said Mr. Phelps.

If the last class of HOPE recipients attended school with the new guidelines about 3,600 students would have kept their scholarship, said Mr. Wright.

The new rules “will likely keep more students on the scholarship,” he said.

ONWARD and UPWARD

Since the beginning of the scholarship program, private and public higher education entities have seen a marginal increase in the number of Tennessee high schoolers choosing to attend in-state colleges, according to the 2008 Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship Program Annual Report.

Before the lottery scholarship, 81.6 percent of state high school graduates enrolled at Tennessee institutions, but last year 84.5 percent attended in-state schools, according to the report published by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

“We are keeping students in state that were going to colleges on the border,” Mr. Wright said.

Although more students are choosing to go to in-state schools, Tennessee’s graduation rates have remained flat, he said.

Before the HOPE scholarship became available, the graduation rate at Tennessee Board of Regents universities was 43 percent, and it is still 43 percent. At University of Tennessee campuses, it was 58 percent before the scholarship and is now 59 percent, Mr. Wright said.

The availability of the lottery scholarship is not convincing students who didn’t want to go to college to go, it is affecting the choices of high schoolers who already planned to attend college, he said.

For example, with the HOPE scholarship, more of the state’s brightest students are enrolling at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Since the scholarship came into effect, UT has seen the average ACT score and grade-point average of entering freshmen climb.

This year’s incoming freshmen at UT have an average high school GPA of 3.76 and an average ACT score of 26.6, said Richard Bayer, assistant provost and director of enrollment services at UT.

Last year’s freshman class had an average GPA of 3.68 and an average ACT score of 25.9, he said. Before the scholarship was offered, in 2003, the average ACT score of entering freshmen was 24.4.

UT received nearly 14,000 applications for the 2008-09 school year, an 8 percent jump from last year, and admitted 64 percent of applicants, Mr. Bayer said. Seventy-two percent of last year’s applicants were admitted, he said.

“It has surprised all of us,” Mr. Bayer said. “We are building a critical mass of good students. We are becoming a destination of good students in the state.”

georgia’s experience

The jump in in-state students and the growing prominence of the state’s largest research institution are typical shifts in states with lottery scholarships, said Christopher Cornwell, an economics professor at the University of Georgia who studies the Georgia HOPE scholarship, which is similar to Tennessee’s.

Fifteen years ago, UGA was not as selective as it is today. Before Georgia started its lottery-funded HOPE scholarship in 1993, UGA drew about 25 percent of the high schoolers in the state who scored 1,500 or higher on the SAT. Today, the school pulls 75 percent of those students. This year, the average GPA at UGA was a 3.8 and the average SAT score was 1260 for incoming freshmen, Dr. Cornwell said.

“It was now free (for students) to stay in state,” Dr. Cornwell said. “As the applicant pool got richer, UGA started attracting the very best students in the state. Now it is a very different place as far as the quality of the student body.”

Over time, improved standards at UGA have pushed some students out of state, especially those who were seeking the big university experience but were not accepted to UGA, he said.

“There is only one place you can get the big school experience,” he said. “There is a running joke that Auburn University (in Auburn, Ala.) is our backup school. That is where kids go that don’t get into Georgia.”

As UT becomes more selective, more students may leave Tennessee for the big state campus experience at Auburn, the University of Alabama or the University of Mississippi, Mr. Bayer said.

In Georgia, UGA’s higher standards are not without controversy.

“Not a lot of people are thrilled about their flagship institution becoming so selective when it is their own children who can’t go,” said Dr. Cornwell “This has been a bit of a struggle for people within Georgia.”