Should Georgia Tech students be held to the same HOPE GPA requirement as other students?

I tell kids there are four essentials to doing well in college and grad school; don’t miss any classes, keep up with the reading, take good notes and review the material nightly.

However, you can adhere to that advice at a tough school like Tech and still not make dean’s list.

Tech students who were top high school performers, had perfect or near perfect scores on the SAT or ACT in math and attend their college classes faithfully can still struggle, typically in their first and second years at Tech.

And they lose their HOPE funding as a result.

Georgia needs those Tech graduates. It's not only for the sake of the students that I raise this issue. We ought to do all we can to support Georgia students pursuing the tech, math and science fields. (Spoken as the mother of poli sci and philosophy graduates.)

I put the question of the Tech student losing HOPE to a 2.9 GPA to the chancellor of Georgia’s colleges and universities when he visited the AJC recently.

Given the rigor of Georgia Tech courses and the state's increasing need for math and science talent, should Tech be treated as a special case and the GPA threshold to retain HOPE Scholarships lowered?

Chancellor Hank Huckaby told me, "I don't know how you deal with that but I understand the argument can be made. I don't have an answer but it keeps coming up. And that argument is getting louder. It, quite frankly, is something we haven't addressed yet."

Any suggestions on how the state should address it?

If we agree we should cut students in grueling and critical need disciplines slack, should we apply the lower GPA requirement to math, engineering and science majors at other Georgia colleges?