For years Georgia's HOPE Scholarship program provided full tuition scholarships to high achieving students. State budgetary shortfalls reduced its generosity in 2011. Under the new rules, only students meeting more rigorous merit-based criteria would retain the original scholarship covering full tuition, now called Zell Miller, with other students…

The Tuition Opportunity Program for Students (subsequently renamed the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, also known as TOPS), Louisiana's merit-based student aid program, was created via Act 1375 of the 1997 Regular Legislative Session. The first freshman class to receive TOPS awards entered postsecondary education in the fall of 1998. Act…

This dissertation investigates several topics in state merit-based financial aid research. The main research content includes three separate studies, primarily using the administrative datasets from the Missouri Department of Higher Education. The first study is an empirical paper that examines the effects of the Missouri Bright Flight Scholarship…

States collectively invest over $12 billion a year to support over 4.5 million students through financial aid programs. This interactive 50-State Comparison provides a look at the specific criteria employed in the top two largest aid programs by state. This interactive resource includes details about which state programs are linked to measuring…

For more than seventy-five years, standardized tests have been considered a vital tool for gauging students' readiness for college. However, few people--including students, parents, teachers, and policy makers--understand how tests like the SAT or ACT are used in admissions decisions. Once touted as the best way to compare students from diverse…

This study evaluates the effect of Florida's Bright Future Program on student college choices. We used regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of two award levels, which had different SAT/ACT thresholds, on the probability of students choosing in-state public colleges and four-year public colleges. The most consistent and robust…

This study examined the trends in enrollment numbers and academic quality of first-year Tennessee students on the merit-based portion of the Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS) upon HBCU's and religiously focused institutions in Tennessee from 2005-2014. The researchers hypothesized that the merit-based portion of the TELS was a…

This report describes the findings from a series of descriptive analyses seeking to understand the potential relationship between college access and school poverty for high-achieving middle school students, focusing specifically on potential access to state merit-based grant funding. Researchers monitored the academic achievement of more than…

This study examined if the Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship (TELS), which began in 2004, was related to student retention at the six Tennessee Board of Regents four-year institutions. This study investigated the impact of the TELS on student retention at TBR universities and general knowledge regarding retention. Post-facto data were…

As the nation's newest broad-based merit aid program, the Tennessee Education Lottery Scholarship program's generous eligibility requirements may target the very students who are disproportionately left out of similar programs in other states. This article compares the scholarship eligibility rates of Tennessee students with three other states:…