Unequal Futures: In Florida, poorer communities fund scholarships for wealthier kids

“The kids hit the jackpot this year.”

That’s how then-Gov. Lawton Chiles described Bright Futures, the Florida Lottery-funded scholarship program, when it became law 25 years ago. But that jackpot’s prizes aren’t paid out equally.

An Orlando Sentinel investigation found that Bright Futures’ benefits go disproportionately to students from more affluent areas and mostly bypass students living in poorer neighborhoods — the same neighborhoods where higher lottery ticket sales provide much of Bright Futures’ money.

The popular Bright Futures program amounts to a transfer of wealth from low-income areas to wealthier ones — or a “reverse Robin Hood effect,” said Mary Borg, a professor of political economy at the University of North Florida.

It is also poor public policy, Borg said. “We’re giving scholarships to the kids who would go to college without that,” Borg said. “We need to concentrate our public dollars on kids who can’t go to college without this kind of aid.”

Borg was one of two researchers who worked with Sentinel reporters to examine sales data from the Florida Lottery and Bright Futures records from the Florida Department of Education for more than 900 Florida ZIP codes. The analysis, based on Lottery data from 2018 through 2020 and scholarship data from 2017 through 2019, built on Borg’s previous studies that reached a similar conclusion. The investigation was funded by a grant from the Education Writers Association.

In 25 years, Bright Futures, the state’s largest scholarship program, has spent $8 billion in Lottery revenue paying tuition bills for almost 1 million students, tying the awards to good grades, volunteer or work hours and high ACT or SAT scores. The scholarships do not consider family income.

The biggest beneficiaries of Bright Futures, the Sentinel analysis found, are students from some of Florida’s wealthiest communities.

The Top 10 Florida ZIP codes with the most Bright Futures winners in the years studied, for example — including suburban Orlando’s Avalon Park and Oviedo — all have median household incomes in the top 20% of the state, most in the top 10%, according to Nate Johnson, founder of Postsecondary Analytics, a higher education research firm based in Tallahassee, the Sentinel’s other researcher.

Lottery sales were higher in places where Bright Futures awards were scarce. In ZIP codes with similar populations, every $1 million of Lottery sales equated to at least three fewer Bright Futures awards, Johnson said.

Created by the Florida Legislature in 1997, Bright Futures aims to reward the state’s best high school students with scholarships that cover 75% or 100% of yearly tuition and fees. That amounts to about $4,775 to $6,370 a year at the University of Central Florida. The merit program gave out nearly 120,000 scholarships last year.

Florida leaders tout Bright Futures as one of the initiatives that helped make public universities in Florida affordable, to the benefit of millions of Florida families. Ken Pruitt, former president of the Florida Senate who served nearly two decades in the Florida Legislature, was one of the programs’ creators and remains a staunch advocate.

He argues the program ended a “brain drain” of top students attending college out of state and boosted the stature of state universities when those teenagers enrolled. He credits Bright Futures for the University of Florida’s much-celebrated No. 5-in-the-nation ranking for public universities by U.S. News and World Report.

Pruitt doesn’t buy that a merit program automatically hurts students from low-income families. “Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you can’t achieve,” he said. “If you give them incentive and the bar they will get there.”

Bright Futures critics disagree, saying the scholarship’s ties to ACT and SAT scores — a poor measure of academic promise, in their view — is unfair. The scholarship requires at least a 25 out of 36 on the ACT or a 1210 out of 1600 on the SAT, scores at the 80th percentile or better.

“The correlation between family income and test scores is as well known a data point as anything in education,” said Bob Schaeffer, public education director for FairTest, a group opposed to high-stakes standardized testing. “You’re selecting by income.”

A ‘jackpot’ only for some

Bright Futures was modeled on Georgia’s Lottery-funded scholarships, created four years earlier, and lawmakers said it would fulfill the state’s promise to use revenue from the Lottery for education. Students can use the scholarships at public or private colleges and universities in Florida.

Soon after its launch, Bright Futures became the behemoth of Florida college aid, dwarfing the state’s investment in need-based aid. That flouts state law that says college aid should be provided “primarily on the basis of financial need.”

The Florida Council of 100, a group of influential business leaders, in a 2003 report called the imbalance “a blemish on the great state of Florida” and, like others, urged reform.

Nothing has changed. Florida’s need-based programs got less than 25% of the state’s financial aid funding last year, just as it did for the past 20 years, according to the National Association of Student Grant and Aid Programs.

Bright Futures got 60% of Florida’s aid budget and other smaller aid programs accounted for the rest. Only eight other states devoted less of their college aid budget to helping low-income students pay for college, according to a 2021 report by the College Board.

More than 52,500 Florida college students eligible for need-based financial aid did not get funding last year, state data shows.

Meanwhile, students in Central Florida’s well-off suburbs, from Lake Mary to Windermere, racked up thousands of Bright Futures awards.

Poorer neighborhoods from Eustis to Apopka to Kissimmee were home to far fewer scholarship winners though stores in those communities sold Lottery tickets in numbers that far outpaced state averages.

The same was true across Florida. The places flush with Bright Futures awards were well-heeled communities like Weston in South Florida and the slice of St. John’s County where a Jacksonville Jaguars player recently purchased a $2.6 million home.

Lower-income neighborhoods, whether in Pensacola, downtown Jacksonville or Homestead, mostly missed out on the scholarship program’s benefits. So did the Tallahassee neighborhood around Rickards High School, where Chiles signed the Bright Futures bill on May 23, 1997.

The ZIP codes with the most Bright Futures awards skewed not only wealthy but also white, with more educated and younger families, Borg said. The ZIP codes with the most Lottery sales were lower-wealth communities and also had more Black and older residents, she said.

‘What’s hurting them is test scores’

For most students, test scores prove the biggest hurdle to Bright Futures, but that is particularly true for low-income, Black and Hispanic students who historically score lower on the tests.

“These are students who need it the most,” said Sherry Paramore, a vice president at Bethune-Cookman University, the historically Black college in Daytona Beach. “The other parents can write a check and pay for their students’ education. These students, if they don’t have scholarships, they’re not going to college.”

Paramore is the former president of ELEVATE Orlando, which provides college advice and scholarships to students at three Orange County high schools that serve low-income communities. In her three years with the program, much to her frustration, not a single student qualified for Bright Futures because the test score requirement proved too high a barrier.

“They can get the GPA,” she said. “What’s hurting them is test scores.”

ELEVATE works with students at Oak Ridge High, which sits in an area of south Orange where the median household income is about $45,200, well under the state median of about $57,700.

Doraneli Parras, a student at New College of Florida in Sarasota, grew up within walking distance of the high school. She graduated from Oak Ridge in 2020 with top grades but not the test scores needed for Bright Futures.

Every semester she worries how her family, on her father’s construction worker wages, scrimps to keep her in school. Her fall bill, though reduced by grants and scholarships, still showed a balance of $3,730. “Are you sure?” the college junior asked when her parents said they would pay it, the same fearful question she’s asked since she started college two years ago.

Bright Futures would have helped her, and many classmates. “It would have made such a good difference,” Parras said. “I would say we all have similar struggles affording college.”

The ZIP code where her family lives produced few Bright Futures winners but provided plenty of Lottery sales. More than 40 gas stations, supermarkets and convenience stores there sold Lottery tickets for $20 million in sales in the 2019-20 fiscal year — $10 million more than other similar-sized ZIP codes across Florida, according to Johnson’s analysis.

He compared ZIP codes to others with similar numbers of residents, including numbers of residents younger and older than 18.

The total number of Bright Futures awards in the ZIP code around Oak Ridge High that year was 27, far fewer than in similar ZIP codes with higher incomes, including one in Winter Park a dozen miles to the north.

That slice of Winter Park is home to the upscale shops of Park Avenue, and houses for sale there have a median listing price of $759,000. About 15 stores in that ZIP code sold Lottery tickets for a total of $6 million in sales, about $3 million below the average for similar areas.

The ZIP code had 68 scholarship winners that year, more than double the number in the Oak Ridge ZIP code.

With Bright Futures, Florida provides financial support to many students who don’t need it and leaves out students for whom cost makes college less certain, said Donald Heller, recently retired as provost at the University of San Francisco.

“If you’re somebody who is concerned about equity,” Heller said, “it’s frustrating, and it’s discouraging.”

Heller spent his academic career researching college access and success for low-income and minority students, including conducting several studies on Bright Futures and similar programs in other states.

These scholarship programs are akin to governments providing food stamps to families who can afford their own groceries and ignoring those with clear financial need, Heller told a Congressional advisory committee on financial assistance in 2001.

He remains convinced of that today. “If what you’re trying to do is increase access to college,” he said, “your biggest bang for the buck is putting money in needs-based aid.”

But Bright Futures got $318 million more than Florida’s need-based programs last school year.

Heller has little hope Florida will alter its spending priorities or Bright Futures. “Politically, it’s almost impossible to kill it,” he said.

‘It’s a huge help’

Now in its 25th year, Bright Futures is deeply entwined in the college admissions process in Florida, with many parents and students viewing it as a path to reduced college costs. Not surprisingly, proposals to limit Bright Futures funding typically meet with a swift and angry response, as Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, discovered last year when he filed a bill that could have reduced the awards. He eventually walked back most of his suggestions.

Eileen Bentley, a Brevard County mother, was among those who called and emailed lawmakers urging them to vote down Baxley’s bill, which she feared could have meant a loss of Bright Futures dollars for her daughter, a student at Florida State University.

“It is a huge help financially. And one of the main reasons she decided to stay in a Florida school,” Bentley said.

Trying to change the program would amount to the state reneging on a promise, she said. “That’s a real punch in the gut for students who made it their mission to get good grades, get good SATs, volunteer in the community.”

In 2020 her daughter, Morgan, graduated among the top students at Viera High School, where her father is a calculus teacher. Without Bright Futures, Bentley said she and her husband likely would have pushed Morgan to do two years at a less-expensive community college because four years at a university would have been difficult for them financially.

In high school, Morgan, now an FSU junior, spent months studying for the SAT. Starting in ninth grade, she also made getting good grades her mission, all with the goal of securing Bright Futures.

“For me and my family, that gave me a more affordable way to pay for an undergraduate education,” Morgan Bentley said. “I think it’s really great to fund the education of people who live in Florida and excel in high school.”

Florida leaders agree, saying Bright Futures, coupled with the lowest university tuition in the nation, has helped many middle-income families pay for college without taking out loans.

”We will continue to prioritize offering a world-class education at an affordable price, providing the greatest value for our students,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis, in a November press release that touted how affordable higher education was in Florida, in part because of Bright Futures.

As a committee of the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees state universities, reviewed financial aid funding earlier this year, board member Brian Lamb, now the board’s chair, applauded a $400 million increase in Bright Futures spending in recent years.

“That goes directly into the pockets of our students,” Lamb said. “There’s a model that we have right now that appears to be working,” he added. “When something’s working well, we should double down.”

‘An entitlement for middle-class folks’

But it is working better for some students than others.

The University of Florida, the state’s unofficial flagship and its most selective university, enrolls more Bright Futures winners than any other state school, with nearly 26,000 in attendance last school year, education department data shows.

UF also enrolls a smaller percentage of students from low-income families than the 11 other state universities, as measured by the percentage of students who qualify for federal Pell grants, reserved for those from families with the lowest income. Less than 25% of the students on the Gainesville campus had Pell grants, according to a September board of governors report.

But thanks to Bright Futures, the average UF student paid less in tuition and fees than a counterpart at Florida International University in Miami, where half the student body qualified for Pell grants last year and where a 2017 report showed the median family income was also far less.

The median family income for FIU students was $57,300, compared to nearly $107,000 for UF families, according to the report by the New York Times.

FIU has a slightly larger enrollment than UF (nearly 40,000 undergraduates compared to about 38,500), but it has far fewer Bright Futures winners. There were only about 7,300 on FIU’s campus last year, less than a third of the number at UF.

At FIU, the average student paid nearly $3,000 for tuition and fees in 2020-21, after scholarships and other financial aid was subtracted from the bill, according to the report.

The average UF student, though likely from a wealthier family, received far more in aid and so had all tuition and fees covered — and had about $6,000 left over to put toward other costs, such as room and board, the report showed.

“It’s sort of like an entitlement for middle class folks in Florida,” said Holly Bullard, chief strategy and development officer for the Florida Policy Institute, a think tank.

Bullard is among those who have advocated for changes to Bright Futures over the years. Some have suggested adding a need-based component to the program or offsetting the state’s Bright Futures investment with more money for need-based programs.

Bullard said she would support a sliding-scale system that would allow students with very high GPAs to get Bright Futures with lower SAT or ACT scores.

Students can qualify for Bright Futures without test scores, if they complete one of two special academic programs in high school. But for most students, a qualifying ACT or SAT score is needed, and those often prove a challenge. Statewide, only about 21% of Florida’s public high school graduates qualified for a Bright Futures scholarship in 2020.

In the program’s early days, the test score requirements were lower and nearly 40% of high school graduates got the scholarships. But weathering a budget crisis in 2011, the state upped the test score requirements to slash the number of awards.

In the following years, many students no longer were eligible for Bright Futures, but Black and Hispanic students and those at high schools in low-income neighborhoods saw the steepest declines, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported in 2016.

Now, test scores are higher at high schools that serve students from wealthier families — and Bright Futures winners are more numerous at those schools.

At Colonial High School, located in a heavily Hispanic, lower-income area near east Orlando, the average SAT score for the class of 2020 was 876, data from the College Board shows. About 6% of the class of 2020 got Bright Futures.

At Hagerty High School in Oviedo, the average SAT score was 1103. Hagerty sits in a wealthy mostly white suburb in Seminole County. Its ZIP code makes the statewide Top 10 list for Bright Futures winners. About 41% of its graduates qualified for Bright Futures in 2020.

FairTest helped organize a federal discrimination complaint against Bright Futures in 2002, arguing it was unfair to Hispanic and Black students and should be altered to make test scores less significant. The complaint was dismissed more than a decade later by the U.S. Department of Education, which found no evidence Florida’s program violated federal anti-discrimination laws.

Florida leaders were pleased. Sen. Marco Rubio, who served eight years in the Florida Legislature before entering Congress, called the complaint “baseless” and urged the federal government to drop it.

“This is a race-blind, merit-based program that supports Florida’s most promising students,” Rubio said in a statement at the time. The scholarships, he added, are handed out “solely on merit.”

‘Because we can afford it’

Many factors contribute to lower scores among students in poorer families but part of the difference, Schaeffer and others say, is that wealthier parents pay for tutoring to help their children earn scores needed for Bright Futures and for admission to the state’s more selective universities.

Lorrie Ashley, a Pinellas County mother, said her family spent about $3,000 on tutoring for her daughter, now a senior at St. Petersburg High School, who took the SAT six times and snagged a qualifying score.

“That’s because we can afford it,” she said. “There’s a lot of families out there who can’t afford that.”

Ashley said she feels for the students without that tutoring advantage as they seek Bright Futures and university admissions. “They work just as hard,” she added.

For students who do qualify for the scholarship, Bright Futures can make attending an in-state university an easy choice.

Eduard Dodan, graduated in 2022 from Creekside High School in St. Johns County, with top grades and SAT scores and an acceptance offer from UF. He also had Bright Futures, which played into his decision to turn down private schools like Emory University and the University of Miami, which also accepted him, he said.

His high school sits in the ZIP code that had more Bright Futures winners than any other in Florida from 2017 through 2019, more than 1,100 in those three years. In 2019 alone, the ZIP code had 265 more Bright Futures winners than the state average for similar ZIP codes.

The ZIP code, which hugs the St. Johns River, features large suburban homes and a median household income of nearly $122,000, more than double the state figure.

Dodan, who described his family as middle income, said the Bright Futures program encourages hard work in high school and doesn’t need to change, adding other initiatives could provide need-based help.

“If we give Bright Futures based on just income or based on financial need, then what’s the point of having institution-based aid?” he said. “What’s the point of having your FAFSA filled out?” he said, referring to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

There isn’t enough need-based aid, however.

A Senate report published last year noted that even Florida college students who qualify for federal Pell grants “may still have a balance of tuition and fees” that remains uncovered by financial aid.

Many more Florida students receive need-based aid than get Bright Futures, but they share pieces of a smaller pie.

Florida’s main need-based program, the Florida Student Assistance Grant Program, handed out nearly $234 million to about 139,000 students at the state’s public colleges and universities in the 2021-22 school year, education department data shows. The average award was just below $1,700.

Bright Futures gave out nearly $550 million to about 111,000 students at those state colleges and universities, doling out awards that averaged $4,900.

The Sentinel requested comment on its findings from the Florida House and Senate, DeSantis’ office and the chancellor of the state university system. Only the Senate responded.

The Senate pushed for increases to need-based aid several years ago and views both merit and need-based aid as a “top priority,” said Katie Betta, a Senate spokesperson, in an email.

Baxley’s bill filed last year, though unsuccessful and unpopular, was an attempt to revamp both, she said. It would have increased aid for some Pell grant students and could have reduced Bright Futures awards.

“It was clear that members of the public were vehemently opposed to the Senate considering any changes to the Bright Futures Program at that time,” she wrote.

Betta did not respond directly to questions about whether spending more on Bright Futures violated state law but said lawmakers, as they do every year, will review financial aid spending and policies again in 2023.

Cost a barrier for low-income families

Aminah Harris, program director of The Elevation Scholars Program, an Orlando group that helps top-performing high school students from low-income families get to and pay for college, said cost is “a real barrier” for many of them.

“It’s the number one narrative. Students say all the time I can’t afford to go to college,” she said.

Elevation works with 18 students a year who attend Orange and Seminole high schools. Doraneli Parras is one of the group’s scholars.

Some students find full-ride scholarships. Like Parras, others get by with federal and state grants, with their families and Elevation filling the remaining gaps. More need-based aid from the state would ease families’ burdens, Harris said.

“If I was in charge, and I could make money accessible, that would be an easy ‘Yes’ for me,” said Harris, who previously worked at the UF and Santa Fe College.

Regina Boone graduated near the top of her class at Jones High School in 2021 but knew her working-class family could not foot expensive bills and she would be “scrounging for pathways to college.”

Bright Futures initially offered some hope but she could not earn the needed scores.

“I felt like I missed an opportunity,” said Boone, now a second-year legal studies student at UCF. “In a sense, I felt defeated. I felt left out.”

Elevation Scholars tapped her for its program and helped connect her to a UCF scholarship that covers a lot of her costs. But many classmates were not so lucky when Bright Futures, which everyone hears so much about in high school, proved out of reach.

“It’s a waste of talent,” Boone said. “I feel like it leaves out a lot of underprivileged students.”

The neighborhoods that serve Jones High, including the one where Boone’s family lived when she was in high school, are among Orlando’s poorest and were home to very few Bright Futures winners.

The ZIP code around the high school, however, was among the state’s Top 25 in per-capita Lottery sales.

Borg, the UNF professor, said ZIP code analysis was a “finer-grained examination” than her previous studies based on county data and surveys, and it showed in more detail how Lottery sales skewed higher in neighborhoods where most residents were Black and very poor.

Officials with the Florida Lottery disagreed.

In an email from spokesperson Keri Nucatola, the Lottery pointed to its surveys that show Lottery players come from all income and education levels and match the racial diversity of the state.

But Borg said that does not contradict the analysis, which was based on sales not players. Wealthier residents play the Lottery but typically less often and only when there is a large jackpot, and they spend a smaller percentage of their income on tickets, she said.

The sales data by ZIP code, combined with Census data, makes it clear which neighborhoods generate the most in Lottery revenues and who lives there, Borg added.

‘Someone’s benefiting’

A 2019 report by the Legislature’s research arm reached a similar conclusion.

“On average, adults who were African American, living in poverty, or had low education levels spent more on Lottery products,” read a 2019 report from the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability.

At Andy’s Corner, a convenience store at the corner of Pine Hills and Silver Star roads in Orange, Lottery sales are a key part of business and the main decorating motif, with parking lot signs, door posters and colorful ticket displays all touting the Florida Lottery.

Owner Andy Patel said people play the Lottery “for fun” and “to win.” He likes that the Lottery funds education efforts, though he isn’t sure that plays into his customers’ decisions to play.

“At least it’s supporting someone else’s kids,” Patel said. “Someone’s benefiting.”

Shellie Levine is a regular customer at Andy’s. He stopped at the Pine Hills store on a summer afternoon to buy $20 worth of tickets after finishing up work helping to remodel a home. He said he knew nothing of Bright Futures. He plays, he added with a laugh, “So I can stop working.”

And he is not alone. On many afternoons Andy’s, he said, gets crowded as workers end their shifts. “Everybody wants to get their numbers in.”

Jina Baptiste stopped in that July afternoon, too, with $40 to buy tickets for her father. She is a 2022 graduate of Evans High School, located less than half a mile from the store.

Evans High and Andy’s Corner sit in a neighborhood that is majority Black and Hispanic with a median household income of less than $40,000. Only 20 students in that ZIP code got Bright Futures in 2019, about 100 fewer than the average for similar areas.

Baptiste did not qualify for Bright Futures when she graduated in May and said she planned to enroll at Valencia College, the lower-cost community college.

She also does not spend her own money on the Lottery.

“All that money you use to buy it,” she said, “you don’t win it back.”

This is the first of two parts. Read the second story on OrlandoSentinel.com on Tuesday morning.

lpostal@orlandosentinel.com

anmartin@orlandosentinel.com