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The Wisconsin Covenant, which promises scholarships to students who agree to maintain at least a B average and stay out of trouble, has become an issue in the race for governor. Gov. Jim Doyle scrapped together $25 million last year to provide its first public funding – but the appropriation could be removed next year before the first scholarships are awarded. The life or death of the program could depend on the state’s next governor. Will it survive?

The campaign for Scott Walker, Milwaukee County executive and Republican nominee for governor, signaled on Tuesday that if elected, Walker might reconsider the program. “Scott will support continuing to provide assistance to Wisconsin students who seek a college education,” says campaign spokeswoman Jill Bader. “What he won’t do is make promises the state can’t possibly keep, and that’s exactly what Doyle did when he initially proposed the new program.”

Some Republicans, including State Rep. Robin Vos (R-Caledonia), a member of the state Legislature’s powerful Joint Finance Committee, have questioned whether the state can afford the program shepherded by Doyle, a Democrat. The state faces gloomy revenue projections for the 2011-2013 biennium. “I haven’t found anybody who thinks 2011-2013 is going to be an easy budget cycle,” UW System President Kevin Reilly told The Capital Times in a recent interview.

According to Doyle’s office, about 50,000 students have signed the Covenant pledge since its creation in 2007, and ninth graders have until Thursday to sign up. Students are required to make the pledge by the end of September in their freshman year of high school. Besides offering the scholarships, which are calculated based on need, the program guarantees a spot in a UW System or Wisconsin Technical College school or a private college belonging to the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

The covenant is designed to supplement existing state and federal aid programs. “It’s really unimaginable that any candidate for governor would slam the doors of higher education shut for 50,000 students,” says Doyle spokesman Adam Collins.

Tom Barrett, Milwaukee mayor and Democratic nominee for governor, says his position is that he would review the program “and make any necessary changes.” He says, “The Wisconsin Covenant program has an important goal of helping more people in Wisconsin gain access to a college education.”

Most states have created some kind of program that, like the Wisconsin Covenant, offers state-funded scholarships to students who meet some kind of academic bar, be it a grade point average, class rank or a high ACT or SAT score. The programs are created with a variety of goals, including encouraging talented students to remain in the state, fostering a more educated workforce or helping poor students pay for college, according to a 2009 report on the programs by the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, a research and advocacy group at UW-Madison.

Wisconsin’s program is designed to “fill the gap” for poor students between tuition costs and existing state and federal aid programs. The poorest students, coming from families making less than $25,000 a year (up to $30,000 under some conditions), would receive $2,500 a year for their first two years of college under Doyle’s plan. The first class of Covenant Scholars, students who have signed the pledge, starts college in the fall of 2011.

“They have an expectation,” says WISCAPE Director Noel Radomski. “But with the next governor and with potentially Republicans controlling the legislature, we don’t know,” he says, what will happen to the Covenant program. WISCAPE was critical of the program in its early days for not having dedicated state funding – only a private endowment.

It was founded in late 2007 by a $40 million contribution from the Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corp., a nonprofit student loan company and a major provider of federal student loans. Today, the endowment is still expected to provide most of the scholarship money for the poorest students – $1,500 of the $2,500 yearly grant promised. The state is expected to provide the rest, as well as footing the entire bill for needy students in higher income brackets. Grants for those students range from $250 a year to $1,500.

Students could receive grants in their third and fourth years of college – but the state has said so far that payments in those years will depend on the availability of funding.

Radomski says state and federal aid, for some students, will cancel out some of the Covenant funding since the state won’t pay more than a student’s tuition costs, taking some of the burden off the state. It’s not clear yet, he says, just how much money is needed to make the program work. “Right now, it’s more of an art than a science,” he says.

Doyle is promising that at least in the two years students receive the grants, they will completely “fill the gap” for many poor students. The Covenant’s website says that students in the poorest bracket, if students receive the full $2,500 a year plus average state and federal aid packages, they would have $11,000 that year for college, enough to pay tuition at any school in the UW System.

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