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By Janel Davis
The Legislature gave final approval Thursday to a bill that would pay full tuition for the state’s highest-achieving technical college students
House Bill 697, carried by Rep. Stacey Evans, D-Smyrna, has the backing of Gov. Nathan Deal and would create a Zell Miller Grant Scholar designation for tech students earning at least a 3.5 grade-point average. It now heads to the governor's desk.
The average cost of tuition at Georgia’s technical colleges is about $900 per semester. Books cost about $300, and fees account for an additional $130 in costs per semester, technical college officials said. About 85,000 technical college students earning at least a 2.0 GPA receive the HOPE grant, which pays about $730 toward these expenses each semester.
The approved bill funds the gap between what the HOPE grant already pays and the full cost of tuition. The bill represents part of Deal’s plan to expand the grant program and is a compromise to Evans’ initial proposal that would have paid full tuition for all HOPE grant recipients.
The bill is estimated to cover about 20 percent of the state’s technical college students.
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