Think it’s time for Florida to implement a large-scale Education Savings Account program? The state already has one – Bright Futures. Let’s try to get a postsecondary ESA right.

With the end of the pandemic in sight, school choice advocates are making a push for education savings accounts (ESA’s) for K-12 students that would replace the public school system with grants to parents of children that would be spent on private schools or on homeschooling expenses.

But Florida already has a large-scale ESA program, although it is not at the K-12 level. This ESA program is for the postsecondary level and is called Bright Futures Scholarships. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. The State of Florida is spending $650 million on it this fiscal year.

Bright Futures has twisted Florida’s State University System into a pretzel this year. Florida is the only state whose public universities are requiring SAT or ACT scores for admission in the fall of 2021. Why? The most likely reason is that these same scores are the most important element in selecting students who receive Bright Futures Scholarships. If aspiring State University System students stopped taking the SAT and ACT and the Legislature stopped requiring it for Bright Futures, there would be no way to exclude most of them from receiving the scholarships.

The use of SAT and ACT scores in determining which Florida high school graduates receive Bright Futures scholarships has been controversial during the pandemic because students who narrowly missed the Bright Futures minimums have lost chances to raise their scores since many administrations of the exams were cancelled starting in March.

But it’s been known for years that the SAT and ACT favor students who are from affluent families and those who are white and Asian. Years ago, I heard a Republican researcher at a business-supported think tank call Bright Futures “White Futures”. Nothing has changed since then.

So Bright Futures is an ESA that favors the affluent and is biased against those who are not white and Asian.

Perhaps before we try to upend Florida’s public K-12 schools with an ESA program, we should try to get the state’s postsecondary ESA program – Bright Futures – right.
Start with this: Grant every high school graduate in Florida a $10,000 ESA for postsecondary education. Since about 200,000 students graduate from the state’s high schools each year, that would seem to cost about $2 billion per year. But many of the state’s high school graduates never pursue postsecondary education – although the $10,000 in the ESA might increase the number that pursue degrees or certificates. At any rate, the annual cost of such a program would likely be considerably less than $2 billion per year. We could liquidate Bright Futures and use that $650 million as a down payment on the new postsecondary ESA program, which we can call FESAPS (for Florida ESA for Postsecondary Studies).

Many students should attend four-year colleges, but many others decide for all kinds of reasons that a two-year degree or a certificate that takes even less time to earn is better for them. FESAPS would be a big boost for such students. One of the goals of Florida’s education system should be to give every student the best possible opportunity to achieve a middle class life – which with few exceptions requires postsecondary education of some sort. FESAPS would be a major step toward such a goal.

Florida is facing tough budget times. But more importantly, the state’s reliance on the tourism and hospitality industries has been exposed as a major economic vulnerability. We have a responsibility to give the state’s young people opportunities to pursue careers that are more economically robust than low-paid tourism jobs. In addition, it is in our interest to attract industries to Florida that are more reliable than tourism – and to do that we must provide the workforce that such industries need to thrive. FESAPS would help with both goals.

FESAPS would be an ESA that we could all support.