The recommendations of the HOPE commission assure the popular college scholarship program will be there -- albeit in leaner form -- for children now in school. However, their younger siblings in the sandbox ought to start saving their pennies for college.

Raising the academic bar slightly on who qualifies for HOPE and ending subsidies for books and fees will buy the program seven or so years of solvency. After that, HOPE is again projected to face financial shortfalls as the demand, fueled by population surges, exceeds the lottery revenues that support the scholarships.

The commission chose not to confront that pending crisis head-on but merely forestall it by pruning rather than whacking away at the HOPE overgrowth. When its recommendations come before a politically spineless Legislature in January, the commission's timidity may end looking almost audacious.

The extravagances and compulsive spending of legislators got HOPE in trouble in the first place. Catching sight of a huge pile of lottery money, the General Assembly frittered it away without any regard for the future. To curry favor, lawmakers added on new categories of folks eligible for a slice of the HOPE pie. These add-on scholarship programs have cost about $63 million so far and are budgeted for another $13.5 million this year.

Legislators also diverted $1.8 billion worth of lottery funds that should have gone to scholarships to underwrite museums, security fences and metal detectors and renovations of historic buildings. They used $50 million to build the GPTV telecommunications complex in Atlanta.

Now, it's the job of this same fiscally irresponsible bunch to rein in spending, and few of them are courageous enough to be caught on camera defending cuts to HOPE in an election year. Since it began a decade ago, HOPE has turned into a beloved middle-class entitlement. HOPE now pays for the entire in-state freshman class at the University of Georgia.

By requiring a harder-to-achieve 3.0 average rather than a simple B average and imposing more checkpoints in college where a student can lose HOPE, the commission expects to thin the eligibility ranks by a third or more. Of course, the tightened academic standards may be frustrated by grade inflation. If a 3.0 average means students can't afford Cs, then school report cards may see Cs disappear, just as Ds did.

Eventually, the state will have to decide if it makes sense to pay the way for kids college-bound from the cradle. Yes, free tuition at UGA has kept the brightest students in Georgia and led to more academically competitive environments at all state schools. But there must be other ways to improve public colleges and make them more desirable beyond free tuition. Otherwise, why has the University of Virginia been the top choice of high school scholars not only in Virginia but in surrounding states as well?

The hardest decision ahead may be whether to make HOPE truly meritorious by limiting it to A students with SAT scores above 1300, or make it need-based and confine it to kids from low-income families. No one seems ready to trip over those explosive issues now, but they're waiting on the state's doorstep