South Carolina Higher Ed Agency Short $25 Million on Scholarships Already Awarded

South Carolina’s Commission on Higher Education came up $25 million short on the money it needs to pay colleges for state-sponsored scholarships already awarded for the 2025-26 school year, according to reports from the South Carolina Daily Gazette. 

This miscalculation that lands less than three years after the same agency was caught sitting on a $152 million surplus. 

By The Numbers

• $301.9 million: What the agency projected it would need for LIFE, Palmetto Fellows, and SC HOPE scholarships this school year.
• $330 million: What it actually needed to pay colleges based on what it awarded.
• $25 million: The remaining gap after accounting for a $2.6 million reserve balance.
• 4,000: Additional South Carolina students who earned scholarships compared to last year, according to Executive Director Jeff Perez.
• $2,800 to $10,000: Award range, with the higher figure reserved for students pursuing math, science, education, and accounting degrees.

Why it matters: Students won’t feel the shortfall directly as colleges already credited the scholarships against tuition at the start of the semester via the financial aid award. But colleges are now waiting on the back-end reimbursement, and state law requires that any gap between lottery profits and scholarship obligations be filled from the general fund. That means South Carolina taxpayers are on the hook, and lawmakers must pull money from other priorities as they finalize the budget for the year starting July 1.

What went wrong: According to reports, the agency is still in “analysis mode,” but pointed to a mix of likely factors: higher enrollment, expanded eligibility after the Legislature added education and accounting majors to the enhanced scholarship tier in May 2024, and students keeping their grades up to retain awards longer than projected. State fiscal analysts had estimated the expanded eligibility alone would add $8.2 million in demand.

The flip side: In December 2023, an audit revealed the same agency had let $152 million in unspent lottery profits pile up over six years, which they blamed on a faulty algorithm that assumed scholarship demand would keep rising. The director at the time retired in the fallout, and the current director Jeff Perez took over in summer 2024. The Legislature spent $120 million of that surplus in 2024 on internship programs, school buses, medical residencies, and teacher bonuses.

What’s next: House and Senate budget writers were notified this week and will have to find the $25 million inside ongoing spending negotiations. The episode also raises questions about the agency’s projections for LIFE, Palmetto Fellows, and SC HOPE awards in the upcoming school year due to numbers already baked into both chambers’ spending plans.

How This Connects: State-funded scholarships are one of the biggest tools for cutting college costs, and they vary widely from state to state. South Carolina’s lottery-funded program is among the more generous, but the structural risk is the same everywhere: when projections miss, taxpayers or students pay.

For families weighing in-state vs. out-of-state options, programs like LIFE and Palmetto Fellows can swing the math by tens of thousands of dollars over four years,  making the stability of these funds a real consumer issue, not just a state-budget one.

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