College enrollment in Arkansas is up this fall over last year by 5 percent.

You’ll find the full Higher Education Department release on the jump. It credits deeper scholarship support from the Arkansas lottery and hard times — with no jobs, people go to school.

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I’d like to make two small statistical points:

1) the 10-year growth in college enrollment is 49.7 percent — an average of about 5 percent a year, same as this year.

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2) the Arkansas college enrollment on the same day in 2009 versus the same day in 2008 showed an increase of 6.2 percent. So I guess you could say the lottery scholarships SLOWED the rate of increase in Arkansas college enrollment. (Just joking, but I know, Durango, you get my point — we don’t know enough yet to fully interpret the impact of the lottery on college going, much less on completion. We do know students and parents appreciate the dough.)

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