Research Description:

Effects of the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship

With the possibility of raising college tuition facing the Florida Legislature, the issue of state funded scholarships will be pushed to the forefront, since, as now structured, the scholarships cover tuition. Funded by the Florida Lottery, the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship is one of few strictly merit-based scholarships available to Florida students. I would like to examine how this program has affected universities in the state since its implementation in 1997. How many students who receive this scholarship still would have remained in state if not for the incentive of the scholarship, and how has encouraging some of the brightest students to remain in Florida affected the quality of the state's universities? I will attempt to explain how heavily students weigh the Bright Futures Scholarship against other factors in their ultimate decision to attend a Florida university. To do this I will compare the number of resident applications to, admissions to, and enrollment in universities in Florida prior to Bright Futures to the same numbers after its creation. By comparing data for Florida and states with similar merit scholarship programs to states lacking any such program, I hope to estimate their effects. I suspect that merit-based scholarships like Bright Futures cause state universities to grow more rapidly than those of states that do not encourage students to remain in state.

One reason the effects are of interest is that being with high-caliber students is thought to increase the learning of all students, both through interaction with them and through the effect on curriculum. That is, the quality of education a university offers depends, among other things, on the quality of its students. I will compare changes in admission standards of Florida universities before and after Bright Futures to changes in standards of comparable universities in states with no merit scholarship. Through this comparison I hope to determine if Bright Futures has had an effect on the quality of Floridaís universities.