The political history of the Georgia HOPE scholarship program: a critical analysis

ABSTRACT Since its first announcement on 22 September 1992, the HOPE (Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally) scholarship program’s influence on state policy and American higher education has been remarkable. Nevertheless, the Georgia HOPE scholarship is also worthy of critical interrogation. This paper examines the conception and implementation of the HOPE scholarship program by demonstrating how political agents made numerous changes to the scholarship to gain votes from their middle- and upper-class constituencies. Drawing upon primary sources (including oral histories and newspaper articles), I argue that these changes have crippled the HOPE scholarship’s effectiveness, damaged its ability to serve equity goals, and potentially endangered its future. This historical analysis is conducted through three theoretical prisms. The first draws upon the work of List and Sturm, who argue that ‘secondary policy issues’ that affect a limited number of people (e.g. a scholarship program) are still subject to the ‘disciplining effect’ of elections. The second concerns policy-focused political science, of which Hacker and Pierson's theory of ‘politics as organized combat’ plays a primary role. The third draws from Alon, S. (2009. “The Evolution of Class Inequality in Higher Education: Competition, Exclusion, and Adaptation.” American Sociological Review 74 (3): 731–55) theory of inequality in higher education, in which scholarship allocations are dependent upon a ‘shifting meritocracy’ that favors privileged socioeconomic groups.