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By the end of 2008, the South Carolina legislature will have allocated nearly $2 billion in South Carolina Education Lottery proceeds to enhancing higher education, including $929 million in scholarships and grants to 2-year and 4-year colleges and technical institutions. And House Speaker Bobby Harrell (R-Charleston), who helped create the Life and Palmetto Fellows’ scholarships for S.C. high school students in need of financial assistance to attend college, believes that lottery-funded initiatives are responsible for keeping students in the state.”If a student leaves South Carolina to go to college, odds are they don’t come back to the state after graduating,” Harrell told the Charleston Post and Courier. “But if a student stays in South Carolina to go to college, the chances are much better that they’ll stay.
“That is great news for our state’s economy, long term.”
The Associated Press reported last week that, according to a study by the state Higher Education Commission, “More than two-thirds of students who graduated from colleges in South Carolina five years ago are still in the state, according to a new study.” The study also found that “80 percent of South Carolina high school graduates who attended an in-state school have stayed here since graduating in 2002.”
But how do we make this a long term, consistently-advancing statistic that will end our state’s “brain drain”? The first place to start is K-12 education, or should we say, improving the lack thereof.
It appears that we’ve been making “progress” on that front, but the numbers are deceiving; it’s not very difficult to make progress when you start at rock bottom. We’re making a good start by appropriating lottery money toward education, we just need to put more of it in the right place by paying public educators more, paying public educators more, paying public educators more and wasting less on pet projects.
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Cartoon courtesy of The Economist.
SCPC just did a study on lottery revenues- http://www.scpolicycouncil.com/publications_article.aspx?category_id=11&publication_id=97
The more money legislators are pouring into so-called tuition assistance, the more the schools are jacking up the price (citing lowered general fund inputs) and students/parents now pay more out-of-pocket to go to school in state than before the lottery….
My sister and alot of the people she went to college with could work their way through college without piling up massive debt. That was only 12 years ago.
Doing the same thing now now is impossible and I don’t know a single college student who doesn’t fit into one of three categories:
A)Wealthy family
B)Merit based full ride scholarship
C)Combinations of insufficient state scholarships, middle class parents dipping into retirment reserves, and piles of student loans
Something is fundamentally wrong with the system, it’s getting worse, and the band-aid of taxing the stupid with a lottery isn’t going to fix it.
What really needs to happen is finding better ways to set priority on education resources and more efficient ways to teach. More distance and internet based higher education. More emphasis and social acceptence of trade and vocational schools and less cultural obsession with 4-year degrees being “nessecary” to lead any kind of decent life.