If you’ve been reading the news lately or been checking your email from your Florida school’s financial aid office, then you have heard about the recent changes to the Bright Futures Scholarship, an award utilized by thousands of Floridian college students every academic year. It’s sad to read that the funding for the scholarship has been frozen at it’s last status and students with 100% coverage, who worked so hard to reach that SAT score, community service hours, and other requirements are now going to have to find new coverage or end up paying loans and find themselves in debt with a loan. It’s hard to not wonder if Bright Futures is one of those things like Social Security, that will day be discussed about being completely dropped. College students have enough debt as it is, but perhaps we don’t even really know what debt is just yet and the future of scholarships is scary at this time.
Florida colleges urge student not to panic and that they will work to find funding/loans for students, but at the same time these colleges are having their funding cut by lawmakers some are cutting all kinds of programs just to keep kicking. Bright Futures also has a new stipulation that if you drop a class during the semester you will be forced to reimburse the funds to the state, which means that students will either take the D or F and average GPAs will fall all around or students will end up with tons of loans and debt is going to pile high. Neither looks good for the future of college students. Students really need to strive for the best they can do because times are only going to get harder for those not lucky enough to have funding already available for a college degree.
