The U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights is investigating Florida's Bright Futures scholarships to determine whether they illegally discriminate against black and Latino students, The Miami Herald reported.

A spokesman for the federal agency told the Miami Herald that the office was looking into allegations that the state of Florida "utilizes criteria for determining eligibility for college scholarships that have the effect of discriminating against Latino and African-American students on the basis of national origin and race." The move reignites long-simmering complaints about the fairness of the popular program.

Since the program's inception in 1997, more than $4 billion in scholarships has gone to white or affluent families. In recent years, state lawmakers made the scholarships harder to get by raising the minimum SAT and ACT test scores to levels some say will only further exclude poor students and students of color.

State Rep. Erik Fresen, Miami Republican and chair of the House Education Appropriations Subcommittee, told The Miami Herald the scholarship program is unbiased and based only on the merit of individual students.

"Bright Futures, from its inception, has always been race, gender and creed blind," Fresen said. "Whoever reaches the highest GPA and SAT scores receive the scholarship."

Similar allegations arose last spring after a University of South Florida analysis predicted that the new Bright Futures standards would benefit fewer students, especially those of color.  The analysis predicted that the total number of college freshmen getting scholarships at state universities would drop by about half, from 30,954 to 15,711. It also predicted that Latino students would see a 60 percent drop in scholarships, and black scholarship recipients would plummet by more than 75 percent.

Of all the large counties in Florida, Miami-Dade takes the biggest hit from the new criteria which raise the minimum Act and SAT scores.

While Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho believes the changes will adversely affect students of color, Republicans from Miami-Dade has generally supported the revisions.

 "Bright Futures was meant to be for our best and brightest," state Rep. Jeanette Nuñez, R-Miami, told The Miami Herald. "As we've raised the standards and achievement level in schools across the state, it made sense to raise the bar for Bright Futures. I don't think it is fair to say that just because someone is Hispanic or African-American, he or she doesn't have to make that bar."