Tag: education

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.

When the first HOPE scholars were freshmen twenty years ago, Georgia’s scholarship program looked very different from today. It covered two years of tuition at any public college in Georgia for B students whose household income was $66,000 or less.

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.

Atlanta’s movers and shakers met at the St. Regis hotel today for an event celebrating Usher’s New Look foundation. Though it was all flashbulbs, rappers, and rock stars on what Usher called “the floral carpet,” the entertainer proved to me he was more than just a pretty face and a slick linen suit.

If there’s poetic justice, is there also such a thing as numeric justness? Maybe it’s mere coincidence, but James Wagner, the Emory University president who raised hackles earlier this year by penning an Emory Magazine editorial touting the Three-Fifths Compromise as an example of negotiation, got the support of three-fifths of the faculty who voted last week on a “no confidence” motion against him.

Most schools in metro Atlanta are dominated by one demographic. They’re poor, affluent, white, black, or Hispanic. Their classrooms are filled with fourth-generation Georgians—or refugees who arrived in Atlanta last month.