A second piece of legislation proposing to change how Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarships are awarded passed through a legislative committee Wednesday.
House Bill 1779 by Rep. Dwight Tosh, R-Jonesboro, would require the Arkansas Department of Higher Education to award the scholarships on the basis of credit hours instead of academic year.
Under Tosh's proposal, a student who is in his second year of college but who has taken enough credits to qualify as a junior could receive a scholarship equal to those provided to third-year students.
"What this does, this allows a student who wants to accelerate their career not to be penalized. If they want to go to night school, summer school, now it's applied on the number of hours instead of on increments," Tosh said.
Lottery scholarships increase on the basis of the recipients' years in college.
Currently, first-time recipients get $2,000 as freshmen, $3,000 as sophomores, $4,000 as juniors and $5,000 as seniors at four-year universities. New scholarship recipients at two-year colleges get $2,000 a year both years.
Students who were first awarded the scholarships in the 2010-11 school year each received $5,000 a year to attend Arkansas universities and $2,500 a year to attend community and technical colleges. Those who were first awarded the scholarships in the 2011-12 or 2012-13 school years were entitled to $4,500 a year at universities and $2,250 at colleges.
Tosh wants to change the scholarship amounts for future recipients.
"You could have someone in their third year fixing to graduate and they may be getting their [scholarship awards] ... from a sophomore level," Tosh said.
The proposed system would award first-year scholarship amounts to students who have zero-27 hours of college credits, second year amounts to students with 27-57 hours of credit, third-year amounts to students with 57-87 credit hours, and fourth-year amounts to students with 87-120 hours.
Shortly after the committee passed the bill, Tosh rushed into a meeting with Department of Higher Education officials to work on an amendment that would eliminate logistical concerns and get HB1779 in alignment with Senate Bill 5, which passed through the committee Tuesday. SB5 would reduce the amounts of scholarships for freshmen and change the qualifications for receiving the scholarships.
Harold Criswell, the deputy director of the state Department of Higher Education, said the amendment to Tosh's bill would sync the award amounts and the scholarship requirements with those proposed in SB5, by Sen. Jimmy Hickey, R-Texarkana. It also would delay the start of the effective date to the 2016-17 school year to give the department time to change and test its award system.
"We weren't opposed to going to a credit-hour system," Criswell said. "Our opposition to the bill came from the issue we would have reprogramming our system to put that into effect in the 2015-16 school year."
Criswell said the amendment also would give the department some flexibility next year. If a student is ahead on credit hours going into his freshman year, he could request that the department review his transcript, and if it met the hour qualifications he could receive the higher amount usually given to sophomores.
Tosh said he was contacted by an ambitious student in his district, who had taken college courses and summer courses in high school and planned to graduate from college early. That student wanted to receive the higher amount of scholarship normally awarded to people in higher class years.
Criswell warned that if a student does opt to receive the higher cash amount, once he reaches 120 credit hours, even if he is only in his third year of school, the scholarship would not be awarded for a fourth year if the student decided to continue college to get a second degree or switch majors.
"That's a disclaimer we'll give every student that calls," he said.
The measure will likely be put on the House calendar for amendment today.
Meanwhile, SB5, which would reduce the size of the Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarships for future recipients starting in the 2016-17 school year, is to go to the House floor for a vote today. The bill would change the payout amounts of the scholarships and the eligibility requirements starting with that class.
Under SB5, starting in the 2016-17 academic year, the scholarship would be reduced from $2,000 to $1,000 for the freshman year at two- and four-year colleges. The scholarships would increase from $3,000 to $4,000 for the sophomore year at four-year colleges, and from $2,000 to $3,000 for the sophomore year at two-year colleges.
Scholarship recipients would receive $4,000 as juniors and $5,000 as seniors at four-year universities.
As for eligibility requirements, future high school graduates would be required to have ACT scores of at least 19, or the equivalent on comparable college-entrance exams.
Under current state law, high school graduates must have successfully completed the Smart Core curriculum and achieved either a high school grade-point average of at least 2.5 or a minimum score of 19 on the ACT or the equivalent.