For graduates, the application for the college academic year will be available for free online at fafsa. Can a student use TOPS for any postsecondary school? The amount of funding available for TOPS is contingent upon annual appropriations by the state Legislature.
If appropriations are insufficient to fully fund the program, available funds will be distributed on a pro-rata basis to qualified new and continuing recipients. Stipends for Performance and Honors recipients are also subject to appropriation, and will be pro-rated if appropriations are insufficient to fully fund all TOPS Awards. Enrolling for less than the hours required to be full-time each term, or earning less than 24 hours in an academic year, or withdrawing from school during any semester or term, will cause you to lose your TOPS award.
You should always check with the financial aid office at your school before dropping classes! To renew your Opportunity award, maintain a cumulative 2. Performance and Honors awards recipients must maintain a cumulative 3. What happens if I drop below my assigned GPA?
If your cumulative GPA drops below the required 3. Once you drop to the Opportunity award, your Performance or Honors award cannot be reinstated.
You must send your test results to the Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance as well as to schools where you apply! Skip to main content. If a student attends a college within the Louisiana Association of Independent Colleges and Universities , the award amount will be the weighted average award amount that was set for public colleges and universities during the academic year.
All intersessions and summer sessions are included — Hours earned during the Intersession between Fall and Spring Semesters will be counted toward meeting the 24 Hours Annual Requirement but not toward Full-Time Enrollment — For more information on courses that will and will not fulfill the 24 Hours annual requirement click here.
The absolute deadline to receive your initial TOPS application without a reduction in your award is July 1st following the one year anniversary of your high school graduation. Once you are determined TOPS eligible, your TOPS payments will be made beginning with the first semester you enrolled as a full time student in an eligible Louisiana college. But it had to cut a number of critical programs during ten years of budget cuts from the state that followed the Great Recession.
Those budget cuts were so severe at Nicholls that the school was paying more to the state of Louisiana for mandatory costs like insurance and retirement than it was getting from the legislature. Without much of an endowment, the school is relying almost entirely on tuition dollars.
An English major, Henry has stellar academic credentials. In high school, he earned a 3. At Vandebilt, the requirements for TOPS were drilled into Henry, who is white, and his mostly white and middle-class classmates.
Rodney Woods had an entirely different experience at Thibodaux High School, where about one-third of students are black and two-thirds are low income. Like Henry, Woods excelled academically — he finished high school with a 4. When the ACT came around, he says that a lot of the material, especially in the math section, was simply foreign to him. He took the exam twice but could only score as high as 18 — two points shy of the cutoff to receive a TOPS scholarship that would have allowed him to go to Nicholls virtually tuition-free.
The college preparation that each young man received in high school — or lack thereof — reflects that disparity. Davante Lewis of the Louisiana Budget Project believes that the TOPS program is working just as lawmakers intended when they removed the income cap in And they felt like the same people who had access to Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and cash assistance were now also getting financial aid for college. In , the state created a scholarship program just for low-income students like Rodney Woods.
But so far, lawmakers have only committed to spending about a tenth of what they spend on TOPS for the Go Grant program. President Clune is encouraged that there have been no higher education budget cuts in the last two years. The club matches students with mentors to help African American men make it to graduation. Woods was part of the inaugural class last year and says that it helped him discover both his passion and his voice.
As a freshman, he was pursuing criminal justice courses, but he floundered, and eventually confessed to his CROWN mentor his true passion — photography. Farren Clark, who coordinates CROWN in addition to his role teaching public speaking, says the program has already raised retention rates for African American males.
While the program has been able to prepare students emotionally and academically for success in college, the biggest hurdle facing most of them is the cost.
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