Georgia's immensely popular HOPE scholarship — an award that for years has been given to average and sometimes below-average students — is significantly harder for high school graduates to get, thanks to new eligibility rules applied this year.

About 18,000 fewer public and private school seniors qualified this year, compared with the average for the last two years, early state figures indicate.

And the dropoff in HOPE-eligible students is significantly steeper in some metro Atlanta school systems than others.

The city of Atlanta saw its pool of HOPE-eligible students plummet nearly 53 percent compared with the past two years, according to preliminary state figures. In fast-growing Forsyth County, the number of HOPE qualifiers sank about 10 percent.

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Most years, more than half of Georgia's public school seniors met the award's grade requirements for a B average. But in the most dramatic shift in HOPE's history, only about a third of Georgia's 2007 public high school seniors will have qualified for HOPE scholarships this year.

Recipients still need a B average, as they did in the past, but the new rules adopted by state legislators were designed to make grade calculations more uniform, regardless of what high school students attended.

State legislators approved the grading changes in 2004 to become effective this year. The changes, in part, were prompted by predictions that, without cuts in spending, fast-growing HOPE would soon dip into its financial reserves as funding from the state lottery slowed.

Instead, lottery revenues have soared, easing the financial pressure on HOPE.

That's reason enough to hold off on the changes, said Charles Lawrence, a real estate broker in southwest Atlanta. He said his son missed out on HOPE this year because of the grading changes.

"It's going to negatively affect a lot of the schools with the big minority populations," he said. Lawrence, who is black and describes his family's circumstances as lower middle class, said he thinks people in low-income and heavily minority communities tended to be less aware of the changes and so they didn't alter the mix of classes they took or the effort they made to get HOPE under the new rules.

"Many of us didn't understand how the calculations would work," Lawrence said.

His son graduated earlier this year from Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School and thought his GPA was high enough for HOPE. The 18-year-old was stunned when he found out it wasn't.

"My first thought was that they had made some type of mistake," said Dionte Lawrence, who wants to major in education and psychology.

He still plans to attend Fort Valley State University near Macon. A scholarship from his church, another from the local PTA and money he's making from a summer job will cover his first semester. He may need a student loan for the rest of the school year. After that, he says he wants to qualify for HOPE based on his grades in college.

Advanced courses hurt

In Marietta, Leslie Cohen said her 17-year-old daughter was a National Merit semifinalist but didn't get HOPE because of this year's changes in calculations. Emily Cohen, who landed a $10,000-a-year merit scholarship to attend Agnes Scott College, had loaded up on tough classes her entire high school career. Her final semester at Pope High included Japanese III and three advanced placement classes. Under the old system for HOPE, she could have gotten more credit for some AP classes she took and she could have dropped poor grades in some of her extra core classes.

"There is no way you can make everybody happy," her mother said. But, she said, "What really bothers me is the attitude seems to be: 'Let's help fewer kids.' And that seems to be counter to what HOPE was set up to do."

In metro Atlanta, the steepest declines in the number of HOPE-qualified students were in the school systems with the biggest percentages of minority students — the city of Atlanta and Clayton County. The smallest local declines were in Fayette and Forsyth counties — which have some of the smallest percentages of minority students locally.

But the declines didn't necessarily fall along racial lines. For example, Cherokee, where nearly 80 percent of the students are white, had one of the sharpest declines in number of HOPE qualifiers.

"We're going to have to look into the data to see why we declined so much," said Mike McGowan, a spokesman for the Cherokee school system. He said that after the changes were made in 2004, the system sent letters home to parents of middle school and high school students informing them that changes would be made in calculating HOPE eligibility.

The Georgia Student Finance Commission, which oversees HOPE, said it informed school systems three years ago that the changes were coming.

David Lee heads research and analysis for the commission, which is still tabulating data. It's hard to pinpoint exactly why some school systems saw dramatically steeper declines than others, he said.

State Sen. Bill Hamrick, a Republican from Carrollton, co-chaired the commission that recommended the grading changes for HOPE. He says he wants to find out why there were sharp differences in how the alterations affected school systems.

"We don't want to disqualify based on race or geography," Hamrick said. "We don't want that to kick out an inordinate number of rural students or minority students.

"If the numbers indicate that is the case, and indicate it over time, and the money [HOPE funding] is not an issue as much, then we may need to try to figure out how to compensate for that."

In defense of changes

State Rep. Bob Holmes, a Democrat from Atlanta who also sat on the HOPE study commission, said he isn't surprised by the disparity among school systems. There also are sharp differences in how different school systems compare on standardized test results, Holmes said.

He said he doesn't think the changes made to HOPE were too much, but he said schools need to make sure they have properly informed students about the revised formula.

HOPE is a merit scholarship, Holmes said. "A B standard or a 3.0 isn't, in my mind, an extremely high standard. ... You don't give scholarships to C students."

But that's what was happening under the old system based on the University System of Georgia's own way of considering grade-point averages, according to a Board of Regents review.

HOPE stands for Helping Outstanding Students Educationally. When then-Gov. Zell Miller unveiled the idea for it in the early 1990s, he pitched it as a way to help bright students whose families would have difficulty paying for college. For its first two years, HOPE included a cap on the annual family income of eligible students.

But HOPE turned out to be a scholarship that many of Georgia's high school graduates could come to expect, even if their grades weren't great. Part of the reason is that HOPE's traditional requirement for a B average has been wide open to interpretation.

One standard for all

Prior to this year, school systems reported HOPE grade averages to the state. Each calculated averages their own way, since there are no statewide standards for grading systems. Now, the Georgia Student Finance Commission calculates GPAs using a uniform system for weighting some harder classes, counting all core classes — rather than just some — and relying on a 4.0 scale, which can make it harder to earn a B average than with a 100-point scale.

While fewer high school graduates qualify for HOPE under the new system, that doesn't mean a big decline in the number of Georgia kids who attend college, says David Mustard, a University of Georgia associate professor of economics.

HOPE hasn't significantly increased the percentage of Georgians who go to college, said Mustard, who has studied HOPE for a number of years. Instead, it has given Georgians more incentive to attend Georgia colleges and universities rather than out-of-state schools, he said.

Mustard expects the changes to spark an increase in the percentage of HOPE students who can earn good enough grades to continue qualifying for it throughout college.

In the past, fewer than half of HOPE scholars have stayed in school and had high enough GPAs to retain the award. Mustard also predicted that the toughened standards will persuade high school students to buckle down.

"By tightening the rules," he said, "you actually give an incentive to work harder."

HOPE chart:

• Number of students eligible at metro schools