Lottery scholarship money declining? There’s a simple answer

According to this story from KOB Channel 4, New Mexico’s lottery scholarship program is not generating enough revenues to continue into the future.

You can’t make people play the lottery and thus goose revenues, so what can be done? The simple solution is to increase academic standards for students receiving the scholarship. Currently, recipients can skate by with a mere 2.5 GPA. That is not exactly a high hurdle.

It would be interesting to see how many of those kids earning scholarships with GPA’s 3.0 and below are able to graduate in four years. Interestingly, the national average GPA for high schoolers is near 3.0, so raising the bar a bit should not be too high a standard considering what the lottery scholarship offers. Will raising the standards solve the problems, we’ll see if we can find the details on this, but it could certainly lead towards higher standards in higher ed.