More Students to Receive Scholarships

It was initially noted that around 25,000 Arkansas college students starting the new semester will get help from the now lottery-funded Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship. However, the number will be even higher than first thought!

More than $121 million in scholarships have gone out to students attending both four-year and two-year colleges in our state. As you may have heard by now, these students were divided into categories. Traditional students are those just graduating high school and entering college as freshmen. Under the law, there is no funding limit set on scholarships for qualifying traditional students. In fact, every single qualifying traditional student who applied received a scholarship - that's more than 12,000 students. Current achievers are qualifying current college students who went straight to college after high school and have completed at least 12 credit hours every semester since then. The law designates $41.5 million to fund awards for these students. In this category, also, every person who applied and qualified was given a scholarship (4,987). In addition, about 5,000 current college students were already receiving the Academic Challenge Scholarship from previous years and will continue to receive the award.

Students who have gone back to college, or have not earned the minimum of 12 hours each semester since high school, are placed in the non-traditional category. The law sets aside $12 million in scholarships for these students. However, the response in this category was even bigger than expected. There were more than 30,000 non-traditional applicants, and of those, nearly 9,000 qualified for the scholarship - too many to be funded by the allotted $12 million. Since every qualified current achiever who applied had already been covered, the law allowed $5.9 million of the funding for that category to be used on additional scholarships for non-traditional students. Those awards went out his week. Unfortunately, that still leaves more than 3,000 qualified non-traditional students on a waiting list, with priority based on factors like a student's GPA and closeness to completing a degree. There has been some frustration out there throughout the scholarship application process, and that is certainly understandable. The Arkansas Department of Higher Education reviewed a massive number of applications, and we are committed to working with them to help improve the process in the future.

However, I urge you not to lose sight of the progress made. In the less than two years since Arkansas voters approved a scholarship lottery, that organization has not only gotten off the ground, but it has helped put $121 million in the hands of more than 27,000 Arkansas students! Given this huge undertaking, the results are impressive. All along, we have been committed to making sure every qualifying high school student could get a scholarship. That has happened. We were committed to getting scholarships to as many qualifying current achievers as possible, and awards went to all of those students. Unfortunately, the funding was never going to allow for every single applicant to receive an award. However, out of more than 54,000 total applicants, all but 3,861 qualifying students were given scholarships. Are there improvements to be made moving forward? Yes. However, these scholarships are helping more Arkansans get a college education, and they're not only making a difference in the lives of those students, but in the future of our state.

To check your scholarship status, or find out more about the application process, click here.



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