Student opposition mounts against scaling back Bright Futures scholarships
TALLAHASSEE — Florida students are rallying against a proposal from Senate Republicans that would dramatically reshape the state’s widely popular Bright Futures college scholarship.
Opposition campaigns have sprouted on social media as students claim the legislation — which aims to tailor the coveted financial aid to degrees that lead directly to jobs — would result in more college debt and limit their career choices. In one week, an online petition fighting the measure eclipsed 53,000 signatures with the bill teed up for its first hearing on Tuesday.
“It’s a debate between having money or following your passion,” said Thomas Truong, a high school junior in Orlando who is part of one opposition effort.
Top GOP lawmakers this week were doubling down their plans for retooling the $650 million scholarship program. FL SB86 (21R) introduces widescale policy shifts that could mark the most substantial Bright Futures cutback since the Great Recession, altering how much money students can receive for the awards currently earned by some 119,925 students.
One student-led group, Save Bright Futures, already launched a full-blown website complete with a logo — the letters SBF in the shape of an orange — before a hearing was even scheduled for the bill.
The eight students behind it, including Truong, Kaylee Duong, a senior in Orlando, and Heesu Seo, a junior in Tallahassee, run multiple social media accounts sending resources and updates about the legislation. They spent seven hours breaking down and annotating the 29-page bill for their webpage, which warns that “Bright Futures is in danger.”
The group this week linked up with Jocelyn Meyer, a Brevard County senior who launched an online petition opposing SB 86. With the petition and website connected, more eyes are being drawn to the legislation while the signatures keep coming.
“I was in class [Thursday] and there were people who I’ve never talked to talking about this bill because they saw this on social media,” Seo said in an interview.
Bright Futures scholarships currently cover between 75 percent to 100 percent of tuition, a policy that has been in place since 2018 when the Legislature restored the top awards following cuts triggered by the recession.
The proposal on the table now, sponsored by Sen. Dennis Baxley (R-Ocala) and supported by leaders in both chambers, would instead base Bright Futures scholarships on an amount set annually in the state budget.
Eligibility for state financial aid programs would be limited to 60 hours starting in 2022-2023 unless students are enrolled in a “market-driven” degree program by the state university system Board of Governors and state Board of Education.
Senate President Wilton Simpson defended the proposal this week as a way to teach students about the cost of education while ensuring Bright Futures remains a valuable program for the state.
Lawmakers raised the standards for Bright Futures in 2019, a move that was projected to eventually drive down enrollment and costs, yet the program this year is projected to need a $14.2 million budget amendment to meet its demands.
The potential Bright Futures policy shift is beginning to draw attention from Democrats in the early days of session.
State Rep. Anna Eskamani (D-Orlando), a past Bright Futures recipient, said the Legislature should instead focus on increasing access to colleges and universities.
“It is so anti-free market,” Eskamani said in an interview. “Everyone wants to talk about freedom, and yet you want to restrict what students can study with money that is rightfully theirs.”
Bright Futures has long been credited as a key ingredient behind Florida’s top rankings for higher education by U.S. News & World Report, a distinction heralded frequently by Gov. Ron DeSantis and lawmakers. More than two-thirds of university students in Florida — 70 percent — attended school without taking out a loan, according to recent BOG data.
Some 2.7 million students have received more than $6.2 billion dollars in Bright Futures awards since 1997, according to data from 2020.
Some students say they are planning to travel to Tallahassee next week to attend Tuesday’s hearing. They warn the proposal could have far reaching consequences that could ultimately push students to leave Florida who otherwise would have studied here.
“If funding gets cut, then I would not skip a beat to go out of state,” Duong said in an interview.