One Simple Way the Arkansas Lottery Can Pay More in Scholarships
We keep saying it over and over again: There is one simple way the Arkansas Lottery can pay out more in scholarship money. All Lottery officials have to do is increase the percentage of lottery revenue budgeted for scholarships.
As we wrote earlier this week, the Arkansas Lottery only paid 18% of its revenue last month toward college scholarships.
And for Fiscal Year 2015–which ended last June–the Arkansas Lottery paid a paltry 17.7% of its gross revenue toward scholarships.
To put these numbers in perspective, the State of Louisiana has a law on the books requiring its lottery to pay 35% of its gross revenue toward education. That’s why Louisiana’s lottery is able to make less money in lottery ticket sales than the Arkansas Lottery, but still pay out more in education funding.
Lottery officials continue to insist that if they set aside a larger percentage of gross revenue for scholarship funding, then the Lottery will have less money for prizes, marketing, and so forth; this, they say, would cause lottery ticket sales to go down, and fewer ticket sales would mean less money for scholarships.
The argument, essentially, is that by keeping the percentage of gross revenue allocated for scholarships lower than most states, Arkansas is somehow able to sell more lottery tickets and make more money for education as a result.
To show how flawed this argument is, here is a breakdown of the numbers: (more…)