EDITORIAL: Too many Nevada students aren’t maintaining eligibility for the Silver State Opportunity Grant program

The Silver State Opportunity Grant is less than two years old, but some lawmakers hope to tweak the program this session.

The grant of up to $5,500 is available for low-income students seeking to attend one of the state’s four community colleges or Nevada State. The scholarship currently receives $2.5 million in annual funding, and in the fall of 2015 — the program’s initial offering — 619 students obtained the stipend.

Problem is, too many of them aren’t on a path to a degree. Of the first 619 recipients, a whopping 36 percent lost eligibility by the following February — most for failing to maintain the 15-credit minimum requirement.

A single year hardly offers enough data to draw hard-and-fast conclusions. But Assemblywoman Olivia Diaz, a North Las Vegas Democrat, now proposes Assembly Bill 188 to lower the credit mandate to nine units a semester.

“It’s their entry into the college system,” she said of the grant winners. “I know that they also have economic hardships that might make it difficult for them to afford attending college.”

No doubt, that’s true. Ms. Diaz’s well-intentioned solution, however, threatens to exacerbate the problem. Students who attend college part time are far less likely to graduate.

A 2013 USA Today report on a National Student Clearinghouse study revealed that, “Only 21.9 percent of exclusively part-time students obtained degrees within six years — compared to 77.7 percent of full-time students — while 67.1 percent dropped out.”

Nevada’s own data are even worse. Numbers from the Nevada System of Higher Education show that “the one-time graduation rate of students who took fewer than 12 credits per semester was 3.5 percent,” the Review-Journal’s Natalie Bruzda reported this week.

The reasons for this vary, of course, but — as a whole — full-time students invest more time in the pursuit of a diploma and therefore have more incentive to finish.

Rather than the drastic reduction proposed by Ms. Diaz, a modest adjustment to 12 credits — still considered full time at many universities — might be appropriate. In addition, a more comprehensive screening program to identify the most motivated candidates could help reduce the drop-out rate for award recipients.

The Silver State Opportunity Grant represents a modest and worthwhile effort to help kids succeed who may not otherwise have the financial means to attain a college diploma. Some modest adjustments to the initiative may indeed ensure more recipients earn a degree. But AB188, in its current form, is unlikely to achieve that result.