The University of Arkansas plans to offer 50 full scholarships to minority students next year.
The scholarships will offer the same benefits as the university’s Chancellor’s [merit-based] Scholarships and will be funded from the same pot of money, meaning fewer Chancellor’s Scholarships will be offered, Provost Bob Smith said….
Smith said he’s not aware of many cases in which an institution has been sued because it offered certain scholarships only to members of minority groups.
Many? I wonder how many it would take to persuade Smith that he should give this plan a second thought. Or perhaps he could enlist someone from the law school to summarize the import of Podberesky v. Kirwan, 38 F.3d 147 (4th Cir. 1994), cert. denied 115 S. Ct. 2001 (1995), which held that public university schlarships available only to minorities are unconstitutional. True, this governs only the Fourth Circuit. Perhaps Provost Smith could reasonably hope that the Supremes, with the converted O’Connor still on board, might look favorably on such limitations now.
Provost Smith should hope that no one challenges Arkansas’s race-specific scholarships, for it seems to have quite a number of them.
As a single parent who works two jobs to take care of my two girls. We aren’t poor enough to qualify for many and my girls aren’t good test takers to qualify for the scholarships and we aren’t minorities. Where are the opportunities for us? My girls end up having to take out loans. Where is the equity in that?
I am sick of reading about the vast number of scholarships available to you if you are a minority, indian, military, academics 3.0 or 4.0 gpa, single parent, or my favority, financial need. I want to know who decided what financial need means. My husband & I have been married for 22 years. We both worked until June of this year, when my employer relocated after I had worked for 18 years with his practice. We now have one income with a family of four. I am attending college at this point, trying to better my chances for another job in a small economically poor area. If this is not financial need I don’t know what is. If we are not considered minority, I don’t know who is. How many other people do you know that are married, raising the children they made together, and working trying to send their children to college. Where is the scholarships for us? Where are scholarships or grants for students who want to attend college and are not on public welfare or a 3.0 gpa? Where are sholarships or grants for people like us? We are the people who pay the most taxes, and nothing is available for our children! Something is terrible wrong with this. Frustrated, Dwana Lee
By definition, a “minority” is a member of an underrepresented group. So, in this case, that could mean a male of any race who chooses to study in a traditionally female-dominate subject, such as nursing (for example). Minority can also refer to encouraging attendance by students from underrepresented areas of the state or country. Perhaps there aren’t any students from a particular county, thus they would be a minority. That one little word has a very broad definition.