"There’s a growing competition among colleges and universities to enroll students who can foot the bill for their education with little or no financial aid from the schools. But paradoxically, the colleges are attempting to attract these highly sought-after students by giving them financial aid – even when the students can pay their bills without it.
The result? Less scholarship funding is available for low-income students who are then unable to attend because they can’t afford an expensive college education without a big aid package."
The author is Former New York City Schools Chancellor Harold O. Levy, now executive director of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which Levy promotes in the article.
Silly opinion piece…schools looking for full pay want the $ it brings in…schools looking to add stats are looking for stats, not money from the kid. If their stats go up, they figure they’ll get more donations…leading to better available FA. Even if it costs something from FA to start. There is a method to their madness. Does it work? Not sure. To me it is like saying you have 1 ear of corn to plant, and 5 hungry people. Do you let one person eat the corn? What good will that do versus planting them hoping to feed all 10 eventually.
Very few meets full need schools give significant merit. Why? They don’t need to boost anything to drive donations…
“Merit aid AIDS in funding low income students” would be a better description.
Money from colleges isn’t owned by the students (rich or poor). You can’t steal from someone who doesn’t own it in the first place.
There are counter-arguments as to why it’s better for all students in the long-run when a school improves its profile by using merit to attract the bet students.
I thought this was an odd thing to include in an article lamenting giving merit scholarships to the wealthy, since the most selective schools don’t tend to give merit aid:
It would also have been interesting to see a stat on how much of this merit aid is actually going to “wealthy” students. My guess is that the truly wealthy students aren’t chasing merit aid, whereas middle class students are more likely to choose a school for its scholarships.
this is kind of a dumb article because it only proposes two kinds of students – wealthy students who can afford full-pay but take advantage of merit scholarships, and poor students who have their need-based aid “stolen away” by the mere existence of merit aid.
it completely fails to mention the literally millions of students from lower-to-middle income families who might not necessarily qualify as “poor” but cannot remotely fund $50K-$60K per year for college. for such students who work hard to achieve good grades and test scores, merit scholarships are a vital piece of the paying-for-college puzzle.
the article also misses a rather obvious point that merit scholarships are not designated for wealthy students – poor kids can earn them too.
the handy dandy http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/ tells us that full rides are available at several schools for ANY student – rich or poor – who hits certain GPA+SAT/ACT requirements. this falls under the category of the dreaded “merit aid” that this article tries to argue is a bad thing. these are concrete examples of merit aid making college attainable for low-income students.
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But taking scarce financial aid dollars from low-income students to give to students who don't need it amounts to Robin Hood in reverse -- robbing from the poor to give to the rich.<<
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this is baloney. author is flatly stating that all students are either rich or poor. there are literally tens of millions who fall in between these two poles. and what about a poor kid who busts his tail and earns a full-ride merit scholarship to Howard University? how exactly is his merit aid robbing from the poor?
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at our nation's most selective colleges, a mere 3% of students come from families with the lowest 25% of incomes. In contrast, 72% of students come from families with the highest 25% of incomes. This means that for every low-income student at the elite schools there are 24 wealthy students.<<
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well … so what? these same numbers tell me that the entire middle 50% of family income only accounts for 25% of students at the most selective colleges. so where is the article bemoaning the woeful under-representation of talented students from the middle 50% at these schools?
all this article demonstrates is that enrollment at the most selective colleges is – drumroll please – skewed toward the wealthy. gee. stop the presses. you don’t say. it does not address how merit aid is impacting, positively or negatively, the availability of need-based financial aid from the 3000 or so other colleges that 95% of us will wind up attending.
@Wien2NC - FWIW, I disagree with the article as well. I posted it because I have never seen the argument that merit aid “hurts” low income students and I was curious to see how others on CC feel about it and perhaps if anyone can back up his argument.
I think a better case can be made for the impact that athletic scholarships/offers have on bright, but poor and non-athletically gifted applicants.
also it did not make sense to point out the disparity between wealthy and poor students at the most selective universities, since as @HRSMom and @“beth’s mom” pointed out, they don’t even need to offer merit aid to attract students, and many if not most of them do not.
strange article. it was like he tried to address two completely different situations, but wound up addressing neither.
This article dovetails a bit with the Time April 18 article “What Colleges Want Now” had a concern for “as many as 18,000 low income kids in America who could get into a top school but didn’t apply to even one.”
There seems to be a lack of concern by some of these kind of articles for the majority of students - from low to high middle class families who are juggling a lot of financial issues with their college students. Some have planned better financially than others for college expenses, and some find they get ‘penalized’ by their financial planning.
I wonder what kind of balance some of these colleges/universities consider for true diversity of incoming students.
At most schools merit awards are renewable provided the student maintain a specified minimum GPA, usually in the 3.0 to 3.5 range and avoid major disciplinary actions e.g. setting off the sprinkler system in your dorm because you were drunk and though it would be cool.
These are the same people who claim charter schools and voucher programs ‘steal’ from the public schools. It implies that they own the rights to the resource. Each university should be able to do as it pleases.
“…3% of students come from families with the lowest 25% of incomes. In contrast, 72% of students come from families with the highest 25% of incomes. This means that for every low-income student at the elite schools there are 24 wealthy students…”.
“…taking scarce financial aid dollars from low-income students to give to students who don’t need it amounts to Robin Hood in reverse – robbing from the poor to give to the rich.”
“…Because wealthier students don’t depend on merit aid to stay in school…”
Editor’s Note: Former New York City Schools Chancellor Harold O. Levy is executive director of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which awards scholarships to high-achieving students from low-income families and grants to organizations that serve such students.
He is complaining that schools give freshmen a one time merit scholarship freshman year for around $4000. He wants that money to go to poorer students.
I wonder exactly how much income is the 75th percentile
…and the bottom 25% have a family income of $28,000 or less. I am pretty sure these high achieving poor kids he is talking about are getting more than a one time $4000 award…
Why didn’t he write an article about how D1 sports scholarships hurt poor students? If a school is looking to improve their football team, they ‘buy’ players with free tuition. If a school is looking to bring in highly talented students to improve the academic profile and vibe of the school, so they can draw in more students and fund more lower income students.
Well, @SuzyQ7, to make that claim one would have to do an analysis of how many of the students on athletic scholarships are from poor families and how many from middle class and how many from wealthy. Certainly a lot of the students in D1 football and men’s basketball are from poor backgrounds, but I have no idea if the other sports break down similarly. Certainly from everything I hear sports like lacrosse and swimming skew middle to wealthy class.
Bottom line, the article is ridiculous as presented. Certainly one can have a discussion if schools that give a lot of merit scholarships, like Tulane, Miami, Alabama, and quite a few others are “doing as much good” as compared to funneling all that money to meeting all need of lower income students. But that is more of a personal values and how you see the world type question. If you are mainly socialist in your thinking, then of course you think it should be based strictly on need. Otherwise, and obviously this has been the traditional values of this country, merit can be recognized along with need. @mom2collegekids is 100% correct, it is the college’s money and, most pointedly in the case of private schools but I would argue the same for publics, it cannot be stealing or any other similar term you want to use.
Certainly the author, Levy, is very confused about merit scholarships versus need based grants, the latter being what he meant when he talked about them only being guaranteed for one year. Even then, most schools do not play bait and switch with this, if for no other reason than because the word gets out so easily these days. But I think he is also confused in that the scope of what he is talking about is really not that large, I don’t think. I don’t think stopping merit scholarships would have the uplifting effects he thinks it would, and the middle class would be in a bigger world of hurt.