In Georgia, the scholarship that matters starts at a GPA of 3.0

Won in high school, kept in college

Both scholarships are settled before college starts. Georgia recalculates the student's GPA from the high school transcript. HOPE also needs four courses from Georgia's Academic Rigor Course List. For Zell Miller, the test score must come from a single sitting before graduation. A named valedictorian or salutatorian qualifies for Zell Miller with a GPA of 3.0.

Then the scholarship has to be kept. UGA's aid office sets out the rules. A student keeps HOPE with a college GPA of 3.0, and keeps Zell Miller with a 3.3. The GPA is checked at 30, 60 and 90 attempted hours, and every spring. A student who loses the scholarship at two checkpoints cannot get it back.

A student who loses HOPE after two years pays the tuition it would have covered. At UGA that is about $22,257 over the last two years. Where HOPE pays least, it is about $7,253.

Without the award, the plan matters more

The award changes more than the price. Families earning $125,000 or $200,000 paid a median of $68,059 over four years with HOPE and $96,351 without it. With HOPE, 67 percent of those families never borrowed. Without it, 43 percent never borrowed.

For the families on our grid without HOPE, a good plan saved a median of $3,036 over four years. Of all the savings, 67 percent was the American Opportunity Tax Credit. It is worth up to $2,500 a year. It counts only tuition, required fees and books that you pay yourself, not from a 529 and not with a grant, and it takes $4,000 of those a year to get the full credit. 10 percent was interest the family never paid, from spending savings first and starting loans later. The other 23 percent was Georgia's tax deduction, earned by putting some of the family's own cash through Path2College before it paid the bill.

From another state, the tax credit still leads

A family from another state gets neither scholarship. Georgia's public universities cost those families $26,906 to $52,901 a year before aid. For them, a good plan saved a median of $827, and 43 percent of that was interest. Borrowing more than a family could repay was rare. Parents would have had to borrow more than one and a half times their income in 7 of the 378 scenarios we priced.

What that looks like for four families

All four families are at Dalton State College, the campus with the lowest published cost. We print every figure we used, including the aid we assumed and why. Each row is one family, not an average, and none of them is a quote for you. We do not know the parents' credit in these rows, so a plan and the standard approach borrow at the same average rate. The last column shows what a plan saves if the parents have good credit.

The 21 universities, cheapest first

Bachelor's-degree universities with complete cost data, projected to 2027. Cost of attendance includes tuition, fees, housing, food and books. The scenario table above assumes no HOPE or Zell Miller award. We price the awards in their own section.

Guides to other systems

We do the same work for each system. The systems are built differently, so what is true of one is often false of another, and we write each guide from its own numbers.