<p>I don’t know how it’ll work with this new incentive, but for the existing tuition rebate, son and some of his friends found they were automatically out of the running due to AP and dual credit classes in high school even with the first 9 hours not counting. The problem lay in the fact that the AP and dual credit classes offered at most of our area’s schools are in the humanities meaning most kids have English, History, Government, Economics, Foreign Language etc, but those kids planning to major in engineering and computer science fields did not need 12 hours of English, etc… and their degree plans had no elective spaces for using many of those courses, but they counted toward that requirement. It’s not a very flexible policy, allows for almost no classes beyond those called for your major even if you take a heavier load and still graduate in the same number of semesters. I haven’t seen any statistics, but I would guess only a very small percentage of Texas’s total college students wind up getting the rebate and due to stories I’ve heard from parents with kids at UT Austin, A&M College Station and some impacted majors at other state schools, graduating in 4 years is not possible because the kids can’t get the classes they need each semester. With increasing enrollment and state funding cutbacks, I don’t see that situation improving. A&M already pushes kids to the Blinn community college option, and UT Austin offers some freshman students a program where they start at UT San Antonio and a couple of the other satellite campuses and depending on their grades, they might have the chance to transfer to UT Austin their 2nd year. So neither school has the space as it is, much less the space and classes to offer the majority of the kids a realistic chance to finish in 4 years. So it sounds good, but I’m not sure how many students will actually benefit.</p>