With the arrival of spring comes decision time for most high school seniors. Many decisions are driven by financial concerns: how will college be paid for, will a grant, scholarship, or award be available, I qualify for HOPE today but what about next fall? There are many excellent resources on the internet that are attempting to track hope scholarship changes. I thought it would be useful to provide an easy one stop place to find them.
Hope Scholarship Changes Guide
First, I think this blog is a great resource for hope scholarship changes. So, look around, research what is here, and let us know how to improve the site.
The University system of Georgia has a site that they’ve created just to track the effects of changes to the hope scholarship on students attending colleges and universities in the Georgia system.
Many newspapers are tracking and reporting on the legislative session along with proposals to the HOPE program. The Atlanta Journal Constitution is a good resource for tracking the many balls in the air with respect to bills in the Georgia legislature and how they might change the hope scholarship.
One of the most important resources available is the tracking site for the Georgia Legislature. If you know the bill number for the house or senate, you can track the path of the bill as it is being considered. Unfortunately, it is difficult to track a bill by a meaningful name, you have to do a little digging to find the bill numbers. Here is the way to track bills that might cause hope scholarship changes. Use “hope scholarship” in quotes for the keyword and select search. As of this writing, there are about 18 different bills that in some way affect the hope scholarship. You can also see each bill’s sponsor if you want to contact them with your input. Once you take a look at this site, you will understand why it is quite difficult to actually keep up with the many proposals concerning scholarship program.
Of course, no list like this would be complete without the main portal for georgia based scholarships. GaCollege411 provides a large amount of information for the complete list of scholarships funded by the state of Georgia, including hope. It is also the main site for each student’s personal profile and tracking point for information required for these awards. Although the site does not track changes and proposals, once the hope scholarship changes are ratified and made into law, the site will be updated with the correct detail. Here is the hope link.
I hope these additional resources will help you with your research and desire to track hope scholarship changes.
