Nathan Moore's Thoughts
Subsidizing the Subpar: An Improper Focus on HOPE
Congratulations to Tennessee taxpayers and lottery losers – you are now funding the education of underachieving college students on an unprecedented level.
Yesterday, both houses of the General Assembly approved a stop-gap reduction in the GPA required to maintain the benefits of the state’s lottery HOPE scholarship
Among the nine scholarship programs, the most expensive of those, at $14. 1 million, extends the amount of time a HOPE scholar can keep their award with a cumulative 2.75 GPA from 48 hours to 72 hours of college work.
For that 2.75 student to continue receiving the grant at that time, however, the 2.75 student must make a 3.0 GPA in the semester in which he reaches 72 hours and each subsequent semester to retain the HOPE award.
A student failing to make a 3.0 GPA in those semesters would lose their scholarship but have one chance to earn it back.
You can now complete over half your undergraduate education with a 2.75 GPA and get it funded, with the hopeless caveat that if you are at 2.75 in your 71st hour, you still have a snowball’s chance to reach a 3.0 in your 72nd hour.
If our post-secondary world was that of our ancestors, I might not have a problem with a 2.75 minimum. However, in 2008, there really is no such thing as a “gentleman’s ‘C’”. An “average” student now earns a 3.0. Look at the bell curves, and where the normal distribution peaks. Grade inflation, fueled by an irresponsible focus on self-esteem and delusional parents, has moved the markers. A 2.0 GPA is therefore now subpar. Anything to the contrary is a myth the Democrats in the legislature had been peddling in their effort to lower the GPA to 2.75 for the duration of one’s schooling.
We are in the process of ice picking our state institutions to death. Here is what will happen. The schools in the University of Tennessee and Regents system will feel pressure to keep their enrollment numbers up. In doing so, quality will be sacrificed. To keep the equation balanced, more unprepared students will have to be admitted, and ever the more, academic standards will suffer. If we were aiming to enhance the University of Tennessee’s prestige, to put it on par with the University of Georgia or some day, Virginia, this is a fatal step in the wrong direction.
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May 22nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
This sounds about like the mortgage crisis in a way. The money stores gave more and more money to people unqualified to pay it back, then the world marvels at the foreclosures from people who did not know what they were doing in the first place.
…..Now those in power are looking for more ways to give money to students in place of loans (loans that have the highest default rate of probably any loans out there) ,or heaven forbid have them actually work for it,to more unqualified people. Then they will marvel at the quality of work ethic ,in the future ,of young men and women who never had to exert a minimal amount of energy for anything they received. I think the plan is to find 1 out of a 100 that will become a producing adult in society, so this one will be able to support the other 99.
You are right Nathan, the quality almost does not exist now, and society is doing it’s best to lower it even more.
I am daily trying to hire from this and the last generation of young people. I go through 100 applications, talk to 20-30 that can complete “most” of the application, schedule a 2nd interview for 8-10, only 4-5 show up, hire 2, 1 does not come to work the next day, and the other one comes in to work, ask for days off next week, and quits within the next 30 days. Time to start over again! The rarest commodity on our world today, work ethic.
This is the real world.