Scholarships: Need vs Merit

Great Debates
1

I listened to Robert Reich’s commentary this morning on NPR (unfortunately I can not find a link to it). He states that universities are giving more scholarships based on the academic merit of the students rather than their financial need. He claims that in the past more aid went to needy students. I don’t know the facts, but that’s not important for what I want to discuss.

Reich believes that it is better that scholarships be based on financial need. He thinks it is unfair that financially better-off students with good academic records receive financial aid priority over poor students with less good academic records. That is he is in favor of need before merit. He gave more reasoning that I couldn’t understand (so I admit I may not be representing his views fairly).

I strongly disagree with this idea; merit before need is better. I can understand excluding truly rich families from receiving scholarships, but a college education is an enormous cost for any middle-class family. A student should be able to earn scholarships by studying hard. For an excellent student to be given reduced scholarship opportunities in favor of students who didn’t study as hard because his family happens to be financially better off seems simply unfair to me.

Yes, we need to improve primary and secondary education, especially in poor school districts. (The current property tax schemes for school funding in many states are extremely unfair.) But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the actual abilities of students. Ignoring merit in our education system is a recipe for a long term decline in the collective smarts of our society. Breaking our university scholarship system to address inequities at lower levels does not fix our education system.

2

Not having heard the interview, I still may side with Reich a bit more on this issue, because a needier student is going to come out of college deeper in debt than a more wealthy student. If need-based scholarships can help students come out of college with a lighter debt load, I think that’s better for all involved. It enables students to have a broader range of choices (they can choose graduate school or public interest work) without having to worry about a crushing debt burden.

First, let me define a couple of terms. A “full-need” student is one whose Expected Family Contribution [EFC], according to the government formula on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid [FAFSA], is $0. A “full-pay” student is one whose EFC is higher than the cost of college. A “partial-need” student falls in between full pay and full need.

Assume college costs $20,000 a year. When colleges calculate financial aid packages, some colleges “gap” their students – i.e., a full need student would have a gap between the amount of his financial aid package and the cost of college. That gap could be anywhere from $20 to $5000, depending on the college and the student.

So a full need student going to a $20,000 a year college may get a financial aid package that covers only $18,000 of the cost. The student must come up with the extra $2000 (which the government has already said he doesn’t have) to pay for college.

Of the $18,000 in the package, a fair amount will be loans. (Some will be grants, some scholarships, some work-study, and some loans.) The loans will likely be lower in the beginning years, more in the later years. By the time a full-need student graduates from college, he could be carrying upwards of $20,000 in debt. (I’m sure I can get an Amen from some Dopers on that.) And if that same student goes on to graduate or professional school, he can pick up another $20,000 to $100,000 in debt.

More need-based scholarships could lessen the debt burden that full need students carry out of college. That’s a good thing in the long term. It can enable a student to stay in school to finish college, to choose a graduate school (even in a less lucrative field), to go into a lower paying job out of school – instead of having to find a job for the most amount of money possible.

Giving academic scholarships based on merit rather than need is not philanthropy. It’s a recruitment tool. If a college gives a scholarship to a full-pay student with excellent grades and SAT/ACT scores, that student may go to that college, adding his excellent grades and SAT/ACT scores to the college’s profile. The college’s average GPA and SAT/ACT score go up, and the college is considered more prestigious. More students apply, the averages go up, the school gets more publicity/better professors/more grants, etc.

Given that all of this “scholarship” business is just that – business – I can see a strong argument for taking the whole concept of “financially blind merit” out of the equation. But given that it is all business, I can’t see colleges moving away from an effective recruitment tool and going to a purely need-based system.

Pleonast, I agree with you that the cost of college is a burden even to a middle class family. I also agree that rich families generally don’t need free money. But I wouldn’t be opposed to moving to a system that is more of a sliding scale – the needier you are, the more scholarship you are eligible for.

3

Robert Reich went to my alma mater, Dartmouth College; he spoke at my graduation from Dartmouth in 1994 when he was Secretary of Labor. Dartmouth, in cooperation with the other Ivy League schools, offers only need-based scholarships and financial aid. When I was a student there the common perception was that this system worked well in many ways, but had a significant flaw in that it tended to penalize families who did “the right thing” by saving their money and not living beyond their means. If you had two families with similar incomes and financial resources, and one spent a lot, particularly on things that do not appear as assets, and the other lived cheaply, the former could find itself having an easier time qualifting for financial aid. (My family was more like the latter, and we got zilch from the College. I did use some merit-based scholarship money from outside the College.)

I think the philosophy that the Ivy League follows derives from their separation of the admissions process from the financial aid process. In other words, they don’t want “ability to pay” to be a factor in one’s admission or rejection. They claim to meet all demonstrated financial need for admitted students, but in practice, this often doesn’t mean much, because the school’s idea of how much a student and his or her family can pay is often at odds with reality. For these schools, the “merit” is demonstrated at the time of application, and once you’re in, you’re in, and no further evaluation of merit applies. I think the need-blind admissions policy is a reaction to the old days when the Ivy League was (almost) exclusively for the wealthy. That’s far less true now than it was a couple of generations ago.

Of course, that’s only financial aid from the college. Lots of people get merit scholarships from outside institutions.

[sub](final note: this no-merit-scholarship policy might explain the Ivy League’s performance in the NCAA tourney.)[/sub]

4

I agree with Reich 100%.

Why give money(taxpayer or school’s) to people who don’t need it?

The circles of the needy and those with merit overlap, so some who have merit will get assistance also, but because they are needy.

5

We’re not referring solely to taxpayer money. What is your opinion about private scholarships (from non-profit organizations, private universities, companies, etc)?

And even for government money, I don’t see why it should be need-based rather than merit-based. Of course there will be students who would receive scholarships under both systems, but what about those who will not? I do not see the advantage to our society to giving a scholarship to a poor student before a good student. In other words, why should a good student be penalized for not being as poor?

Why should we expect scholarships to be philothropy? Does it really matter what motives the giver has for sponsoring scholarships?

6

Having gone through the FAFSA process this year, I can assure you that their definition of rich and mine are quite different. They expect a family to be able to spend a very large chunk of income on college. They also don’t seem to take cost of living in a region of the country into account.

I’m certainly for needs based financial aid, but there is a place for merit based aid also - otherwise some schools will have dual populations - the rich and those poor enough to get a decent package. Middle class kids will wind up at cheaper state schools.

The Ivy League policy is to not look at financial aid in making admissions decisions, which is definitely the right thing to do. But if they want to get their refusal rates will go up if they do not offer aid to students on merit. Their choice.

I may be a bit biased, since we don’t qualify for FAFSA aid, but my daughter has gotten merit based scholarship offers from some of the colleges which have already admitted her.

If colleges don’t want to offer merit based scholarships it is their choice, but kids who qualify may wind up somewhere else.

BTW, both my kids (one is out already) will have 0 college debt - because we feel that is our obligation to them. When I went to college we did get a pittance of financial aid for one term- a loan - that only came due when I finished grad school, several centuries later. With inflation and all, I was paying more in postage than for the payments, so it was no hardship. My father had the same philosophy as me, as did my wife’s parents.

They’re on their own for grad school, though.

7

I don’t doubt that one bit but my post was about the need/merit distiinction, not where one should draw the line between needy and not needy.

Take two students, A and B, both who qualify for a school. B has much better
grades but A still meets the minimum.

A can only go if he gets financial assistance, B can go whether or not he gets
outside assistance. If you give the funds to A, both can go to school. If you give
the money B, A’s left at home.

I prefer sending both.

8

I would certainly favor rewarding the academically deserving first.

The solution for students of all financial situations is therefore: study hard. Study as if your future depended on it.

9

The program that gets the most bright kids in to school is the best one.

We’re not talking about giving full-rides to a kid with a 2.5 here. Plenty of people with 4.0’s don’t get scholarships, and there are plenty of extremely bright and promising kids that don’t have perfect GPAs. The trick is to find these kids and make sure they get the chance to go to college. Scholarships should be first and formost about giving people the chance to realize their full potential. Only then should they be treated as a reward.

One factor to consider is that “merit” isn’t always a great measure of intellegence, potential or even effort made. Poor kids may not always excell as much as rich ones, but they don’t have the same chances to excell. They don’t have a full selection of honors classes and extra-cirriculars. They don’t have a Mathletes team to join. They don’t get to go to prestigious summer programs and internships. They may have to work after school to afford lunch money. They may have to watch their siblings instead of doing intense studying. They don’t get SAT prep class (which do guarentee that they will raise your final score) and may not be able to afford to take it multiple times (I think the SAT, and AP tests, are in the seventy-five dollar range.)

10

I hate to be snarky, but the basic problem here is that the government’s or the school’s definition of need isn’t necessarily what anyone else’s is.

11

But the world’s universities are not one big conglomorate. They compete for outstanding students in order to become better universities – having more intelligent classroom discussions, attracting professors who want to teach the brightest minds, creating future graduate students, professors, donors, distinguished alumni, etc. In your example, student B can still “go,” but he may choose to go to a different school. Well there’s a future Secretary of State who will be a Whatsamatta U grad instead of a graduate of our hypothetical school.

The Ivy League does not do this, as stated. Essentially, they believe they already have sufficient collective prestige to attract the top students they want to all its member schools so they have created a cartel to eliminate price competition among them (though the cartel is no longer official, as an antitrust lawsuit eliminated some of their more egregious practices) . It’s not that easy on the next level.

12

and

A good point to bring up is that neither merit nor need are simple to define. So how one chooses merit versus need may depend on the specific definitions one has in mind. But I think the basic policy of prioritizing academic merit or financial need is mostly independent of those definitions.

13

I can’t see anything wrong with either kind of scholarship.

In addition to the points above, let’s not forget how expensive a prestigious university is these days. A family that’s not otherwise needy can still find if difficult to send a child to those colleges, so it’s not as simple as only helping poor students.

14

Just going to add my personal experience here for your perusal. I completed coursework at a junior college in California and was accepted to UCLA as a transfer student. Because of the way the bureacracy works, I not only didn’t qualify for student aid, I was charged with out of state tuition (because my mom who lives in Colorado claimed me on her income tax so she could send about $100 a month my way via my stepdad’s VA stuff, and get a little extra cash from the claim for me to go to the optometrist, and that sort of thing - at the time I had been living here in California for 5 years and at the time was not married but living with my now-husband.) I got one merit based scholarship from my JC (I graduated summa cum laude and I completed the honors program at my JC), but the ones I applied for at UCLA I was disqualified for because on paper I didn’t have demonstrable financial need. No merit-based scholarships to be found - in my personal experience, you really have to dig around for those. Same went for loans, no demonstrable need and since I was technically a dependent I couldn’t file for any myself. So I had to tell them I wouldn’t be able to attend. On the other hand, my husband went to UCLA (also as a transfer) and got everything paid for, since he was above the age of 24 and was unemployed at the time. FWIW, his GPA was a bit less than mine (he graduated magna cum laude). He did have to take out some loans, but only to the tune of $5800, which I am sure everyone will agree is a bargain, espcially considering that he used alot of his financial aid to pay for my time at our JC.

SO, need is a hard, hard thing to demonstrate in some cases made available (I’d have had a ton though if I had chosen a more vocational major instead of an academic one, but oh well). Personally I would like to see a little more merit-based scholarships. The whole FAFSA thing is useful, sure, but in unusual situations (such as mine) many kids deserving to go to college (and I will not be modest here, I deserved to go) fall through the cracks. However it is not in the makeup of government assitance to review cases on an individual basis.

15

Uh, that ‘made available’ there escaped my editorial eye. Disregard it.
:smack:

16

My inclination is to combine both merit and need. Why do these arguments keep getting framed in ways implying that merit and need do not go together? While students from wealthier families may have more resources and therefore may be more able to achieve academically due to their resources, there’s certainly no shortage of students who come from less wealthy families and are also academically capable. Seek them out.

Of course, at their age, some might not realize that they are in fact quite poor, since poverty is all they have seen so far.

17

My husband and I apparently fall into the “middle class” status in terms of income.

We have two children. The older child (a girl) is extremely intelligent and qualified for gifted/advance placement programs starting in fourth grade. She will start high school next year, and has been accepted to a very qualified HS, in a very high-status program, for next year. If she completes the program with acceptable grades (which is a good possibility at this point), she would probably be accepted into any university she chooses to apply to four years from now.

Our second child, however, has significant disabilities. He is hearing-impaired, as well as language-impaired, and has autistic tendencies, in addition to ADHD. We have had to spend much more money on his welfare than we have ever had to spend on his sister, if only to provide therapy to help him come near to acceptable goals for his age group, in addition to the services and therapy provided to him at no expense through the school system. I seriously doubt that he will ever qualify to enter a college or university, on grades, need, or merit, so we are looking more at vocational education for him at this point.

Our daughter will definitely benefit from college-level courses, and even though she is only 13yo now, I would be willing to bet that she could get more benefit from the university-level courses I teach than the majority of my own students to.

I hope and pray that she will be able to get some kind of merit scholarship during her senior year of high school, so that she can attend a good univerisity program that will help her be successful and happy when she is older and on her own. Because of the expenses involved with her little brother, I am really unsure about how “financially stable” we will be four years from now, when she is applying to colleges and universities. I know that my husband and I will be earning too much at that point to qualify for much in the way of “financial” assistance, but I also know that much of the money we will be earning will go toward expenses other than our daughter’s education.

18

I think you guys overestimate the impact of scholarships.

Very few scholarships are full-ride. The vast majority a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars. It’s not a matter of the poor getting free school while the middle class have to scimp and save and suffer. I personally got a set of grants “reserved for the neediest UC students”, and still ended up with $15,000 in loans. Need-based scholarship families still need to scrimp and spend savings to send their kids to school. The big difference is that without those scholarships these kids wouldn’t be in school. Unfortunately for some kids, they won’t loan you the full $40k for a UC education when you income is $20k. The investment in these minds isn’t worth it.

The Sausage Creature, your story is unfortunate, but kind of irrelevent. You chose or allowed yourself to be listed as a dependent- perhaps illicitly, as your mom doesn’t appear to provide over half your income- and all the money transfers you described could be done as perfectly legal tax-free gifts without having to legally be a dependent of anyone. The UC’s are heavily tax subsidized and have a special charter with the people of California, so they are sticklers on residence requirements. But they don’t keep those requirements a secret and they arn’t all that hard to fill with some planning.

19

I’ll admit I could have done some better planning, but I don’t see how my post is irrelevant.

20

Well for me it breaks down like this:

  1. We shouldn’t let people who don’t belong in college into college just because they are poor, black, native american, et al. Studies have shown that if we give big scholarships to underqualified minorities/poor people et al. these students just plain “don’t last” in college, they drop out by sophomore year. So I think to fix problems like that we have to go to the secondary education level and start trying to enact reforms.

  2. If we’re going to give out scholarships, between two equal candidates, the poorest should get the scholarship, and you can apply that across the board and program-wide to see what I mean.

I think someone ought be qualified to go to the college, but the needy should come before the smart and wealthy.