Pictured Above: Sofia Lombardi (left), President of the New College Student Association, is an outspoken opponent of the bill. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, is the bill’s sponsor.
Courtesy of Sofia Lombardi and Dennis Baxley
By Edyn Gottlieb
A controversial bill that would make significant changes in Florida’s popular Bright Futures Scholarship Program cleared its first legislative hurdle last week.
But the proposal, which has stirred up a hornet’s nest of angry opposition, has miles to go before it becomes law.
Under the bill (SB 86), the state board that governs Florida’s public universities would be required every year to compile a list of academic majors that don’t lead directly to employment.
Students in those majors would get smaller Bright Futures scholarship amounts.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, says legislators want to help students get meaningful, good paying jobs when they graduate.
“What’s happening is, we wind up with a number of people who graduate from (a) university … and they’re not employable for anything,” Baxley told television station ABC7 in Sarasota.
Although the bill was approved on a 5-4 vote by the Senate Education Committee on March 16, the loud criticism from many students, parents and faculty continues to grow.
USF St. Petersburg geography professor Chris Meindl says the legislation and its supporters are a disgrace.
“Most of our Republican legislators have long since substituted their warped ideology for facts,” Meindl said.
“Supporters of this legislation are densely ignorant about the ranges of jobs that students in different majors eventually land. The truth is that many college graduates find jobs working in fields unrelated to their major.”
The outcries of opposition prompted Baxley to rework and temporarily delay his bill, which goes next to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Education.
So far at least, a companion bill has not been introduced in the House of Representatives, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signaled last week that he might not embrace the proposed changes.
“I think Bright Futures is something that Florida families have relied upon,” he said at a March 17 news conference in Naples. “It’s something that I support. I fully funded it in my (proposed state) budget, and we hope the Legislature follows suit on that as well.”
The Legislature created the Bright Futures program in 1997 to reward high academic achievement and keep more of Florida’s best and brightest high school graduates in the state for college.
Using funds from the Florida Lottery, the state awards scholarships that cover 75 or 100 percent of the tuition as well as some fees at Florida’s public universities and eligible private institutions.
In the 2019-2020 academic year, Bright Futures disbursed $618,607,165 in aid to 111,973 students, according to Bright Futures website. Since its inception in 1997, the program has disbursed over $6 billion in aid to 2,824,414 students.
(Bright Futures also awards scholarships to high achieving students who enter vocational and industry certification programs.)
Baxley’s bill, which would not take effect until the 2022-2023 academic year, would also change the funding formula, tying the amount of tuition payments to the state’s budget, which changes every year.
“The passing of this bill would negatively affect a lot of students,” said Barbara Figueredo, a USF St. Petersburg freshman and Bright Futures recipient.
Before the bill was approved by the committee last week, about 70 people lined up to testify against the bill remotely from Tallahassee’s nearby civic center.
One of the opponents was Sofia Lombardi, the president of the New College Student Association in Sarasota.
“I felt like it was necessary to represent my student body and express my significant concerns about the consequences this bill could have,” Lombardi said.
“The idea that you can predict what is ‘employable’ and what is not is absurd. This bill would only push high achieving students out of Florida, which is the opposite of what Bright Futures aims to do. Restricting students’ intellectual freedom based on what they can afford is only going to lead to worse career prospects for Florida students.”
