Tag: HOPE

Top high schools: The ten public high schools with the most HOPE-eligible students and the ten with the most students eligible for the even more elite Zell Miller Scholarship (fourteen schools total because of overlap) are clustered in five metro Atlanta counties.

The letter arrived about three years too late. Six, really, but who’s counting? It said my younger son had been admitted to the University of Georgia. He’d put in his transfer application during a moment of uncertainty, but then decided to stay at Elon University in North Carolina. When both of my boys graduated from high school—each with HOPE-eligible GPAs—they wanted UGA or nothing.

The HOPE scholarship program was launched two decades ago with three specific goals: increase the number of Georgians with postsecondary education, improve the overall quality of the state’s university system, and stanch the exodus of high-achieving students. HOPE has accomplished all three aims—and then some. Over the past two decades, the number of Georgians with college degrees increased from 19 to 28 percent.