Georgia has a good way of dealing with this as well. As recently as a few years ago(they made some recent changes, I'm not sure about now) you could go to a college, get a 3.0 GPA and become eligible for the scholarships. There is also a fantastic exchange program that allows academically late bloomers to transfer to better schools once they start performing better. Both of my brothers took advantage of these means. They both transferred from community colleges to Georgia Tech from community colleges once they got their act together.( and both ended up graduating with highest honors and with less than 10k in debt) If you are that confident you are capable of college but werent able to prov it in high school, i think having to put up a years worth of costs before the state will help you out is a good gatekeeper to making sure only those for whom that is actually the case benefit from the system. At a minimum, it raises the stakes of you succeeding.