Hope Scholarship increases GPA and attendance rates

According to the article “Staying on Target for College” by Andrew P. Kelly, KC Deane, and Taryn Hochleitner June 2014, the Hope Scholarship program can be linked to an increase in average high school gpa scores and percentage attendance of graduating high school seniors attending college.  According to the report:

“Translating Aspirations into Behavior. Long before
students apply to or enroll in college, they develop
educational aspirations and expectations and begin to
behave in ways that will support those expectations—
taking the right courses, studying hard, and preparing
for exams. While upward of 90 percent of high school
students from low-income families may aspire to attend
college, only 54 percent of these students realistically
expect they will be able to do so.  Without a concrete
sense that some kind of postsecondary education is
a possibility if they choose to apply themselves, even
qualified students will be unlikely to behave in ways
that set them up for success.
The good news is, research suggests that it is possible
to influence aspirations. Take the Georgia HOPE
scholarship program, which provides funding for Georgia
students to attend a Georgia public college or university
so long as they graduate high school with a
3.0 GPA. In their 2002 study, Gary Henry and Ross
Rubenstein found that the percentage of high school
students earning a GPA of a B or better increased by
2.9 percentage points between when the program
began in 1993 and when the class of 1998 graduated.
Moreover, as University of Michigan economist Susan
Dynarski found, “After the introduction of HOPE, the
attendance rate of 18–19-year-olds in Georgia rose 7.9
percentage points more than it did in the other southeastern
states.”

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