I was on a scholarship committee and we didn’t automatically award scholarship monies because we didn’t know if and when we would have money, that year, for a scholarship.
We could ALWAYS tell which students had put in the extra effort to present a quality application. Essays with multiple mistakes in grammar and punctuation were immediately not considered. Inability to convey thoughts and feelings adequately were also not considered.
We always had more applications every year for one scholarship. If you want a chance at the scholarship, you jump through hoops. You do the extra work. That “extra work” is what makes a university caliber student. It’s not a “tangled up monopoly”,
It’s simple economics- supply and demand.
If you don’t get the scholarship, then that just means someone else had a stronger application.