According to a Harvard University study released last week, the Bridge to Success and Lottery Success scholarship programs do not boost college attendance among N.M. high school seniors and also widens the enrollment gap between whites and minorities.
Published by the Ivy League school's Civil Rights Project, the study focused on analyzing merit-based scholarship programs in Georgia, Florida, New Mexico and Michigan and included research from UNM social science associate professors Melissa Binder and Philip Ganderton.
Binder said her main concern with the study was that they concluded that the lottery scholarship did not increase college access for New Mexico high school graduates, despite what advertising for the scholarship has suggested.
"As the advertisements for the N.M. Success program indicate, sponsors of the program maintain that the scholarships will enhance access to higher education, particularly for students who may not have considered going to college," the report states. "Our study finds little evidence that the program has had this effect."
The Bridge to Success Scholarship is a non-renewable "bridge" to the Lottery Success Scholarship and helps pay tuition during the first semester attending a New Mexico higher education institute.
The Lottery Success Scholarship is awarded in the second semester to students who finish their qualifying semester by earning 12 or more credit hours and maintaining a minimum 2.5 grade point average. It is only available for fall and spring semesters and offers paid tuition for eight consecutive semesters.
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Binder said although her research also found that the scholarship benefactors tended to be white students and students from low-performance, higher-income families, she believes that encouraging more students to attend college should be the real goal.
She added the study found that all the state programs researched produced the same problems - mainly the lack of a significant increase in overall, as well as minority, enrollment numbers.
"I really do believe there are better ways of spending state revenue," Binder said.
A large problem that the study uncovered was the freshman retention rate - a consistent battle for the University, which ties into Binder's insistence that students must be caught at the middle school level for any program to be successful.
The study states that UNM's "Freshmen tracking system ... shows that the overwhelming majority of freshmen qualify for Bridge to Success scholarships, which are based on high school grades; 83 percent of entering freshmen women and 86 percent of entering freshmen men earned the awards in the first year of the program."
However, substantially fewer students - 62 percent of women and 51 percent of men - earned the Success scholarships in the second semester, indicating that large numbers of students failed to maintain a 2.5 GPA or failed to enroll continuously."
According to the study, the scholarship program did produce positive results in the area of retention figures for high-ability American Indian students from lower income groups.
"That's a nice story because it's very possible those students would not have gone to UNM," Binder said. "That's a program success."
The study states that the American Indian demographic success should be studied more in-depth to see how it can be applied to other minority groups.
Keeping the lottery scholarships has been a fiercely fought battle for UNM ever since its existence was threatened in 1999 when lottery profits were low. The Associated Students of UNM created a position to lobby state legislators to maintain the scholarship.
This year, UNM's freshman class is unofficially the largest in history and part of that success has been attributed, by officials, to the lottery scholarship.
Peter White, dean of University Studies, said that lottery scholarship notifications, in addition to the first semester's tuition, were sent out earlier to those high school graduates with a grade point average of 2.5 or above.
UNM president Chris Garcia and White were unavailable for comment, as they were on retreat Thursday. Ronald Martinez, director of Financial Aid, also was unavailable for comment.
