The Community College Research Center (CCRC) conducted a study to better understand how two-year public colleges react to new state merit-based financial aid programs by evaluating the institutional behavior of each of Florida's 28 community colleges before and after the Florida Legislature created the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship (FBFS) program in 1997. This brief describes the FBFS program, the dataset and model for analysis used in the research, as well as the study's findings and conclusions. The results of the study suggest that community colleges respond to the economic incentives created by the introduction of a merit aid program by modifying their institutional financial aid policies in unexpected ways. The brief is drawn from the full-length report, "Institutional Responses to State Merit Aid Programs: The Case of Florida Community Colleges" (CCRC Working Paper No. 8).