Heather Catlett, a University of Georgia junior, says money from Georgia's HOPE scholarship program has helped her pay for college. BONNIE HEATH/MORRIS NEWS SERVICE

HOPE Scholarship makes school possible

Gov. Zell Miller's HOPE scholarship covers costs for students who enter college with a ``B'' average and keep it

Web posted June 22, 1998

By Joan Stroer
Morris News Service

ATHENS, Ga. -- Heather Catlett wouldn't have grown up anywhere else.

Hayneville has almost everything she needs: a grocery store, a high school and church camp meetings that still rumble with ``Amen.''

Traditional as they may be, Hayneville residents like Catlett are learning to overlook a vice that once brought prayer warriors in her tiny middle Georgia town to their knees -- gambling.

``I've only had one family whose faith was so strong they wouldn't accept HOPE,'' said Hazel Jackson, a senior guidance counselor at Perry High School near Hayneville. ``They believe gambling is a sin.''

A Perry High graduate and a University of Georgia junior, Catlett, 21, is a recent lottery convert. She grew up reading rags-to-riches books with her mother at their Hayneville homestead on a dead-end surrounded by bass ponds, a passel of relatives and flat fallow land.

``Ever since she could talk, I told her she was going to college,'' said Catlett's mother, Debbie Catlett.

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But with a stepdad on disability after a 1985 motorcycle wreck and a mom delivering newspapers and hanging wallpaper to make ends meet, it sometimes seemed more probable that Catlett would head to a job at the local glass company.

Major bank loans were needed if she was to become the first in her family to go to college.

Enter Gov. Zell Miller's now-famous brainchild: his HOPE scholarship covers tuition, fees and $100 in book costs for students who enter college with a ``B'' average and keep it.

With the lottery backing, Catlett began school at Macon College three years ago and is now sailing through UGA toward a degree in environmental management and economics. She's also urging her easygoing brother, Derrick, 15, to get his grades up.

``I haven't had to go to them for money,'' Catlett said of her parents. She works 15 hours a week at the university golf course, maintains a 3.15 grade-point average and manages a modest social life of midnight bowling and apartment parties.

``Everybody's so proud of her,'' Debbie Catlett said.

Lauded as a way to keep Georgia's best students from going to college out of state, the $160 million HOPE scholarship program provides more than $30 million a year to UGA students. HOPE covers all or part of tuition and fees for 128,000 Georgians, including nearly half of UGA's undergraduates, according to the university.

The scholarship also boosts UGA's profile. At the university, where 95.8 percent of freshmen began school last year with the HOPE, school officials say competition for entrance has stiffened dramatically since the advent of the fund.

The school, ranked by Money magazine last year as the 27th-best college buy in the nation, has shed the label assigned by rival Georgia Tech: the drive-through diploma stand.

Click on the chart above to see a larger, more complete version.DAVID ARBANAS/STAFF

Even Catlett, a gifted science student, said she's had to work harder at UGA to keep the merit-based scholarship.

``It makes you try to get as many `A's' as possible, in case you get a `C,' '' she said. ``I think of difficulty level when I take a class, yes. But I believe I can make it through the degree program.''

In front rooms, student lounges and lunch counters, some people now talk about Mr. Miller's HOPE scholarship in tones once reserved only for Georgia football.

``A lot of them are amazed,'' Catlett said. ``They say, `You're a junior, and you've still got it?'''

Other financial support for Catlett comes only in dribs and drabs: $1,000 from the South Georgia Civitan Club, a $1,000 gift from the Houston Lake Golf Club where she worked as a teen and an $8,000 federal loan. The Sunday coupons her mother clips and sends to Athens help, too. But without HOPE, ``it would have been difficult,'' Catlett admitted.

After five years of such praise and testimony, however, the shiny new program is losing some of its sheen.

Some say HOPE, which is lost by roughly half of recipients their freshman year, helps middle-class students more than poor ones. Poorer students who get need-based federal Pell grants must subtract that Pell amount from their HOPE fund. Those outside Pell, however, get the full HOPE amount without deductions. Financial aid counselors protest that provision each year, said Ray Tripp, director of UGA financial aid.

Among other negatives, some university members worry the fund prompts undue grade inflation from sympathetic teachers and increased withdrawals from tough courses. And a recent state survey uncovered widespread ignorance among high school students about the scholarship, which is supposedly spurring them to hit the books harder and earlier in their education.

Nevertheless, the fund rewrites one of the oldest stories in American higher education: bright senior leaves home in search of college scholarships or sinks deep into debt and overwork paying for room, board and perpetually rising tuition.

At Perry High, at least, students and parents just seem to care about education more.

``Yes, ma'm,'' Ms. Jackson said emphatically. ``I see more parents that are interested. It starts now in the ninth grade. They are really on top of things. We're having more conferences now. They're coming in.''

For the Catletts, the lottery has helped in ways more direct than with college money. Heather's aunt moved off a rental farm and bought seven acres and a doublewide trailer home in Hawkinsville, Ga. How? She won $100,000 in the lottery.

``They have their own place,'' Debbie Catlett said.