Friday, May 01, 2009

“Top Georgia Students Lose Assured Scholarships”

Jacob Nord
Current Events
Sociology 202
Final Blog
“Top Georgia Students Lose Assured Scholarships”
3:11 P.M.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/on-education/2009/04/28/top-georgia-students-lose-assured-scholarships.html



Recently, in the state of Georgia school valedictorians have lost promised scholarship money and incentive to go to state schools. Originally, there was a 4.5 million dollar budget for students who had residence in Georgia, now that budget was quietly voted down to only 1.3 million dollars. This now only leaves approximately nine hundred dollars per valedictorian to go to a public University in Georgia, mere pocket change. Many experts feel that this will not convince students to go to public schools that instead they will still be going off to more prestigious private schools in other states.
I think that it is quite awful that the state of Georgia cannot find enough room in its budget to fund deserving students to go to public schools. By not investing in their younger and brighter students, the state of Georgia is really shortchanging itself. Georgia in order to pull itself out of the recession with the rest of the nation needs to give more incentives for its bright young minds to go to school and invest in the infrastructure of Georgia rather than other states. With less valedictorians going to school, less and less Georgians will be able to compete in the national and global job market which is bad news for all. Also, this move on behalf of the state officials sends a negative message to Georgia’s students, as if they do not value them as much as they used to.

2 comments:

Richard Gregory said...

This just goes to show that the horrible economy is affecting everything especially schools. Schools are supposed to help young people brighten and better our future but if funds keep getting cut, they are going to have a harder time making our future more sucessful.

Trisha Butterworth said...

I cannot believe the state is only going to offer about 900 dollars to students to go to state schools. the whole idea is to get students to stay in their state and go to the university. People want more successful people in this world, and all high schoolers to go to college, but only offering $900 is nothing. That does not help anyone for college, especially if you are a valedictorian and such.