Report: Lottery Still Pays 20-Cents on the Dollar for Scholarships
The Arkansas Lottery Commission released a report this week showing the Lottery still only allocates, at best, about 20-cents in scholarship revenue for every dollar it makes selling lottery tickets.
According to Lottery Commission reports for the month of October, the Arkansas Lottery took in $33,271,398.30 in revenue, but only paid out $6,773,936.78 in college scholarships.
Moreover, lottery officials indicated to reporters from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that the net proceeds may have actually been bolstered by unclaimed prize money the lottery has on hand (that is, prize money people have won but never picked up) and by the timing of recent lottery payouts. In other words, the $6.8 million may have actually been more than you might expect simply because of when the lottery happened to pay some of its bills and because a lot of people haven’t stopped by to pick up their winnings.
So let’s do the math: $6,773,936.78 / $33,271,398.30 = .2036 or 20.4%.
So for every $1 the Arkansas lottery commission made in October, about 20 cents went to college scholarships. The other 80 cents were spent elsewhere.
At this rate, the Arkansas Lottery won’t meet its scholarship goals for 2014. (more…)