As drop/add came to an end and we all settled into our spring classes, we got to enjoy the time-honored tradition of seeing our tuition bill show its sinister face.
There was a time when this was no big deal for almost everyone at UF. For the old-timers like myself who remember those days, the Bright Futures Scholarship used to cover all of our tuition.
And then some.
That’s right, not only did we not have to pay extra for our tuition bills, we got money back to spend on books, school supplies, or, more probably, Four Loko.
Four Loko, for those of you who remember, was legal back then.
In those days, getting the tuition bill didn’t involve guessing how much Bright Futures wouldn’t cover and then scrambling to come up with that mysterious extra $50 that you didn’t have to pay the semester before.
Sadly, those glory days are long gone. There’s a good reason for the change, and those days were indeed unsustainable. That doesn’t have to mean the end of them entirely. But a series of poorly-made decisions have nearly destroyed all hope for a reformed Florida Bright Futures Scholarship Program.
The reason the program was gutted and “differential tuition” was implemented — that mystery amount of money that you still have to pay after financial aid disburses — was rooted in all the best intentions. The in-state tuition at UF, at around $3,000 for a year, was hilariously and unacceptably low. So low that the university couldn’t compete with top public institutions like Virginia (with an annual in-state tuition of $11,000), Michigan ($12,000) and Georgia Tech ($9,000).
Raising tuition has been a goal at UF for a long time, but Bright Futures was keeping it soundly locked in place. The program couldn’t pay high tuition for everyone that qualified, so rather than raise the qualifications, they locked down tuition. They thought it was foolproof.
So, when they finally had to raise tuition because the school was getting to the point where it couldn’t function, they just capped Bright Futures and raised tuition without it (hence the “differential”). This was a great move by politicians, because they wouldn’t have to hear complaints by parents who thought their kid was entitled to a state-sponsored education just because he managed to swing a 980 on the SAT.
Never mind that setting such a low bar bastardizes the very idea behind the Bright Futures scholarship. The program was created to keep the “best and brightest” students in the state of Florida by giving them free tuition as an incentive to not go to prestigious, expensive out-of-state schools. Someone scoring a 980 does not usually fit this profile.
Of course, this entire problem could be easily corrected by raising the standards to include only people who might actually be drawn to out-of-state schools — for instance, those who manage an 85th percentile or above standardized test score (about a 1270, or 1890 if you count the writing). This increase in standards would allow schools to raise tuition to competitive levels while still freeing up enough money that those who could not pay for college could get need-based scholarships from the state.
But that would make sense. And because politicians are in charge of this, anything sensible should be far beyond our expectations.
Johnathan Lott is a political science and economics senior.
