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Jewish World Review Nov. 16, 1998 /27 Mar-Cheshvan, 5759
Thomas Sowell
Scholarships based on scholarship
THE LATEST ACADEMIC SCANDAL is that scholarships are beginning to be based
on -- scholarship. Those people whose personal experience has been confined
to the real world may have to reorient themselves to the academic way of
thinking, in order to understand why it is considered scandalous to base
financial aid on a student's academic achievement level.
For decades, colleges and universities have been following a policy of
basing financial aid, not on the student's academic performance, but on
"need" as defined by some rigid formula. The idea of providing financial
incentives for students to excel academically in high school, or investing
the scholarships money in a way that gets the most bang for the buck, has
been anathema in academe.
In other words, the most marginally qualified student, who just barely
managed to get admitted to the college, was entitled to as much financial
aid as a class valedictorian with straight A's and stratospheric test
scores. If the student who just barely made the cut happened to come from a
family with not as much money as the valedictorian's family, then the
scholarship money would be greater for the weaker student.
Strange as this might seem to those beyond the ivy-covered walls, it is
perfectly consistent with the whole mindset that pervades the academy. The
ideal is "fairness" in the sense of equalized conditions.
Increasingly, in recent years, there have been expressions of regret and
much hand-wringing as this ideal has been eroded. Two things have brought
this on. First, blank checks from government to academia are no longer
available to finance every program, policy or illusion that becomes
fashionable on campus. Second, a Justice Department antitrust investigation
of collusion among colleges put an end to an incredible cartel that had
developed among the top trend-setting institutions.
For more than three decades, financial aid officials from Ivy League
colleges, M.I.T., Amherst and other such institutions met each spring to
compare what each of them was offering as financial aid to each of the
students applying to more than one institution in this cartel. The net
result was that financial aid from each member of the cartel would be set so
that the student would have to pay the same net amount, regardless of which
of these institutions he or she chose to attend.
Since the tuitions listed in college catalogues are simply list prices that
are seldom actually charged, what was called "financial aid" was often more
like discounts from the list price, such as are common in many commercial
transactions. The cartel was essentially engaging in price discrimination,
violating antitrust laws.
Once this cartel was broken up, its members began competing with one
another for the best students. That is how scholarships came to be based on
scholarship, much to the anguish of academic utopians.
"We are experiencing a heaping on of greater privilege to wealthy and
middle-class kids," according to Professor Morton Schapiro of the University
of Southern California. The way he sees it, "the poor" are being
"restricted" to community colleges and are "even being squeezed out of
four-year public institutions."
Those unfamiliar with academic Newspeak may need a translation: Students
who do well academically are receiving a "privilege" rather than a reward
when they get scholarships, because they are likely to come from
middle-class or higher-income families, who promote academic achievement
among their children. It is "unfair" in some cosmic sense that some children
come from education-minded families and others do not.
While youngsters from low-income families who do well academically are
equally eligible for scholarships and admission to elite colleges, their
academic levels often will not get them past the community college levels. A
further "injustice," from this perspective, is that a growing unwillingness
to finance high school "remedial" courses in college means that those
students who have not bothered to get prepared for college will be "squeezed
out."
In this Alice-in-Wonderland world, "merit" is a dirty word and things like
incentives and rewards smack too much of the world of business, to which
academics feel vastly superior. The question is not why academics think this
way. The question is why so many others go along with
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