Last Friday the Department of Higher Education released a study showing 40% of college freshmen who received lottery scholarships last year did not return to school this past August. Among the reasons cited for this failure were students’ inability to meet minimum credit hour and GPA requirements to keep their scholarships.
This is nothing new. The Tennessee Lottery faced this very same situation in the spring of 2008, while lottery proponents were pushing to legalize a lottery in Arkansas. Here’s the problem: The Arkansas Lottery does absolutely nothing to prepare students for college. It provides them a little bit of money to pay for their education (and anyone who has paid a college tuition bill recently knows the lottery’s $4,500 maximum scholarship doesn’t go very far at a lot of Arkansas colleges). But as far as preparing students for college and helping them stay in college is concerned, the lottery is useless.
I don’t believe the Arkansas Lottery is capable of having a substantial impact on Arkansas college graduation rates. We’ve said it before: The Georgia Lottery, which the Arkansas Lottery was modeled after, did not significantly increase college graduation rates there. Why should we expect Arkansas to be any different?
Below is a video we published in 2009 about college graduation rates in Georgia compared with Arkansas.
