Bill to Decrease Lottery Scholarship Clears AR House
By: Lisa Mendenhall
Updated: February 18, 2013
The amount of money your student gets from the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery to help them start college is on the way down.
It's a plan backers hope can shore up the lottery and how much your college students get every year, but now in year one, you'll see less if you're sending a student to a 4-year school.
Right now, first-year students at school like the University of Arkansas get $4,500 their freshman year.
Under the new plan, that amount falls to $2,000; but it's a tiered system, so every year, the amount will rise by $1,000, capping out at $5,000 for their senior year.
Simply put, fewer people are playing the lottery and legislators say they knew the amount of lottery scholarships were going to fall one way or another.
"The only question was how was it going to be done, and we felt like this was the best way to go about it and putting us on a sustainable path moving forward, so we would be able to have the funds and the students wouldn't be constantly concerned that every two years we were going to have to lower amounts," Rep. Jeremy Gillam (R) Judsonia said.
Under the newly-proposed provisions, 2-year college students would get $2,000 per year, and there's actually more money for non-traditional students who attend college later in life.
The bill now moves to the Senate.
