Read this morning that the Florida governor announced that high school students with strong test scores will qualify for Florida instate tuition if their grandparents live in the state.
Without getting into the other politics of the Florida governor, I think this is a good move for Florida, as it leverages their strong public universities to bring in younger people into the state, many which may stay afterwards.
Very impressive efforts by both Florida and Georgia public universities to offer substantial incentives to their high performers.
Well…there are a ton of grandparents who live in Florida for six months plus one day. Maybe some of this is to continue to encourage grandparents to move to Florida.
How did they define “strong test scores”.
1330 SAT/29 ACT is the minimum requirement
Interesting. Didn’t the Benecquisto which was discontinued provide a lot of high achieving students to the FL publics?
I believe there was some type of successor program for in-state Florida kids, but do not know the details. Many of the Southern public universities (FL, GA, NC, VA, TX) are now both highly-ranked and financially appealing
This program is capped, I think only 300 in total for 2022-2023 were distributed to the Florida publics.
FSU had 31, here is what they say about the program (and of course the student has to be admitted, a 29 ACT unlikely to get it done at UF for example). I don’t know if awarding the 31 tuition waivers is first come first served, or based on stats, or some holistic measure.
In 2021, the Florida Legislature amended Section 1009.26, Florida Statutes, to create the Grandparent Waiver. Out-of-state first-year students admitted for the summer or fall semester 2022 whose grandparent(s) currently reside in Florida, may be eligible for a tuition and fee waiver of the out-of-state tuition costs up to 110% of total degree hours. Florida State University has been allocated 31 Grandparent Waivers for the 2022-2023 incoming first-year class. Eligible recipients will be selected on a first-come, first-served basis as determined by the date the student submitted all necessary documentation. The awards are renewable until graduation with continuous full-time enrollment.
Eligibility requirements include:
Upon submitting the Grandparent Waiver Request Form, the following documentation will be requested via your Application Status Check:
Your request cannot be processed until everything has been received.
In state still has Benacquisto for NMFs. Out of state NMF Benacquisto was discontinued last year in favor of funding a similar OOS grandparent waiver. But the grandparent waiver was limited. Each school only had so many to award. The recently announced program sounds like an expansion but read the fine print.
They were supposedly working on what “full time grandparent resident” definition would be. If it’s that 6 months plus 1 day…that will open this up to a lot more students than completely full time with no ties to any other state.
@Mwfan1921 i think this initiative described today is a newer version of what you posted.
Hoping someone can clarify.
HMMM, I guess we will have to wait to see the new details!
The requirement is for legal residency by the grandparent, which most of those grandparents in Florida have there for tax and estate purposes already. They can easily show domicile there; ties to other states would not matter.
@roycroftmom how does this bill differ from the grandparent instate incentive which was capped at 300 students per year.
@Mwfan1921 posted that a few posts back.
