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After changes were made to Georgia’s
popular HOPE Scholarship this summer, Reinhardt College stepped
up to help prospective students who have been negatively
impacted. Reinhardt has created a new grant – the HOPE
Scholarship Replacement Grant – to be awarded to 2007 high
school graduates who were HOPE-eligible before these recent
changes, but now find themselves ineligible.
A law passed by the Georgia General
Assembly in 2004 changed the HOPE Scholarship qualification
standards in two significant ways:
The Georgia Student Finance Commission now
calculates each grade-point average (GPA) for determining
eligibility, instead of individual high schools; and
To qualify, a student must have at least a
3.0 GPA for a college preparatory diploma or 3.2 GPA for a
career/technical diploma. This new scale replaces the previous
numeric averages needed to qualify.
All over the state, there have been drastic
drop-offs in the number of students who qualify as HOPE
Scholars. About 18,000 fewer high school seniors qualified this
year, compared with the average for the last two years. Most
years, more than half of Georgia’s public school seniors met the
award’s requirements, but this year only about a third will
qualify. Cherokee County, where Reinhardt’s main campus is
located, had one of the sharpest declines in HOPE qualifiers.
“We understand that the new method of
computing eligibility for HOPE awards by the Georgia Student
Finance Commission has caught some students and families by
surprise,” Reinhardt President Dr. J. Thomas Isherwood said. “At
Reinhardt College, we want to help. We have created a special
program for students who would have been eligible under the
previous system for calculating HOPE Scholarship eligibility,
but now are not. We recognize great potential in these young
people and want to do all we can to help them enjoy the
Reinhardt experience and receive a quality, personal,
challenging and supportive education from people who
care.”
Students qualifying for the College’s new
one-time grant will receive $2000 for the academic year, $1000
for fall 2007 and $1000 for spring 2008.
Julie Cook, Reinhardt’s associate dean for
enrollment services, has mailed several letters about the
program to the College’s incoming freshmen impacted by the
change. “We hope this new grant will motivate our students to
perform academically so they can receive the HOPE Scholarship
from the state after their freshman year,” she said.
Students who have at least a 3.0 GPA after
earning 30 college credit hours are eligible to receive the
state-funded HOPE Scholarship of $3000 per year, or $1500 each
semester.
For more information about this unique
program, please call the College’s Office of Admissions at (770)
720-5526 or 1-87-REINHARDT. Admissions representatives can also
be contacted by e-mail at
admissions@reinhardt.edu. |
