by Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder, [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]

December 2, 2025

Georgia is one of the only states that does not provide needs-based financial aid for would-be students who struggle to pay for college.

But some state lawmakers are making the case that Georgia should change that, though there are disagreements over how best to pay for such a program.

A state Senate study committee released a report Tuesday calling for a comprehensive needs-based aid program for college students just a month before lawmakers are due to return to Atlanta for the 2026 legislative session. But the divisions over funding could make a plan tough to pass, particularly in an election year.

“This is about affordability, and about opening doors,” said Sen. Nan Orrock, the Atlanta Democrat who chaired the state Senate Study Committee on Higher Education Affordability. “Swing wide the doors of higher education, post secondary programs, that will launch young people into successful lives and (they will) stay here in Georgia, and help to continue to build Georgia into the place that we know it can be, but affordability is absolutely the issue.”

The report calls on Georgia to establish a needs-based aid program modeled after those in states like North Carolina and Florida.

To be eligible, a student would need to have a high school diploma or equivalent and be enrolled in an eligible public university or technical college. They would also need to complete a FAFSA application, meet federal Pell Grant requirements with a high need for financial aid and satisfy minimum academic standards.

The awards would be based on the number of classes a student is enrolled in, and the aid would be administered by the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which also administers the merit-based HOPE Scholarship.

The committee’s report is also recommending that the new program be funded from the unrestricted reserves from the Georgia Lottery – a pool of money on top of the funds that are set aside for education funding and meeting shortfalls – which currently sit at $1.7 billion. The money could come either through direct appropriation each year, or through an endowment, in which a larger amount of money would be withdrawn and need-based scholarships would be funded by the interest earned on that money.

Georgia Budget and Policy Institute Senior Education Analyst Ashley Young said about $126 million in lottery funds could provide grants for just over 98,000 students in the 2026-2027 school year who would otherwise not be able to attend college or face massive debt.

“It can absolutely be transformative,” Young said.

Georgia student loan borrowers have the second-highest average student loan balance in the nation at $42,300, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Young said even though University System of Georgia enrollment is at an all-time high, the number of Pell Grant recipients in the system has decreased 5% over the last 10 years.

“It’s not as though they don’t want to go to college, it’s that they are finding it more difficult with increased cost of living to actually afford an option to go,” she said. “And so what we are seeing is that students are just choosing not to because they simply cannot afford it, not because they cannot be successful academically.”

Young said the lack of needs-based aid in Georgia also disproportionately affects Black students, who carry the highest student loan debt burden in the state’s university system.

But speaking after the meeting, state Sen. Max Burns, a Sylvania Republican and chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee, expressed reservations about the proposed funding mechanisms.

“I think the lottery has done a great job for Georgia, I think HOPE has been an excellent tool, and certainly Gov. (Zell) Miller had a strong foresight when he put that program in place, but I don’t think you take funds or resources away from a successful program to fund something that you need, but have not yet developed a comprehensive way to address that. So I’m not a fan of using lottery dollars for this program.”

Burns said that lawmakers agree that a new approach for needs-based aid is needed, but he wasn’t optimistic about progress during the coming session, which falls during an election year and could likely run at a faster than normal pace.

“I think timing is a challenge,” he said. “I think in this session, we’re going to have to begin the process of understanding the problem and educating our colleagues in the Senate and in the House, seeing if we can come to an agreement about how we might choose to proceed. Can we make something happen in the near term? It’ll be difficult, but we certainly want to give it a go and have the conversation, but we’ll get to where we want to be. I feel that it’s important that Georgians have the opportunity to complete their education in a timely manner, with minimal debt.”

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jill Nolin for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.