Tough decisions needed to save lottery scholarship

Few bills passed by the Legislature in recent years have been more revered than Senate Bill 31, passed in 1996. Sponsored by former Majority Leader Michael Sanchez, it directed that proceeds from the state lottery be used to establish a college scholarship fund to pay the way for graduating high school students throughout the state.

The success stories in the years since have been tremendous.

More than 109,000 students have attended college on the lottery scholarship, with more than 59,000 of those going on to earn their degree. Many of those students were the first in their family to attend college, coming from households where a college education had previously been thought to be far beyond their economic means.

The beauty of the program is that it treated everyone exactly the same. To qualify, a student had to be a state resident who graduated from high school or earned their GED in New Mexico. They were required to enroll immediately after graduation, complete 15 credit hours per semester (12 hours for those attending a community college) and maintain a 2.5 grade point average.

And for years, thousands of students were able to continue their education beyond high school.

But, two things have happened since then to turn the beauty into a beast: tuition has gone up while lottery proceeds have gone down. The fund produced $46 million last year, while closer to $60 million was needed to meet demand, according to an Associated Press story last week. And so, instead of full scholarships, students got partial help.

This year the gap is even greater. It is expected that the overall transfers by the end of the fiscal year will be about $9 million less than last year.

Lawmakers passed a bill in 2014 to temporarily boost the fund with liquor excise tax money. That was supposed to give them time to come up with a permanent solution. But now the temporary money has run out, and there is still no solution.

A number of proposed fixes were offered this year, but the only bill that passed was SB420 by Sen. Bill Soules, which will make the problem worse by eliminating the requirement that students go directly from high school to college. There may be a lot of good reasons for that, but there is no question it will increase demand.

It is anticipated that next year the fund may only be enough to pay for 70 percent of tuition costs. As that percentage continues to drop at some point we lose the whole idea of the program, which is to make college available to all students, regardless of their financial means.

I appreciate the egalitarian approach of the original bill. But if they are going to save the program, lawmakers are going to have to be more selective with who gets the scholarship. We can’t keep giving scholarships to students with no realistic chance of academic success, or those from more affluent families, at the expense of cutting out gifted students who may not be able to come up with 30 percent of tuition costs.

The lottery has always seemed like a shaky funding source to me. The state should not have to promote gambling in order send its young people to college. But, this is the system we’ve got.

It’s done a lot of good in the past, but tough decisions need to be made if there is to be a future.

Walter Rubel is editorial page editor of the Sun-News. He can be reached at wrubel@lcsun-news.com or follow @WalterRubel on Twitter.