You may say this is not an either-or proposition, but according to Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment and college relations at Dickinson College, you may be wrong.
In an article by Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews lamenting the fact that “As Merit-Aid Race Escalates, Wealthy Often Win,” Massa said that Dickinson cut its need-based aid “in part because some need-based aid was spent on students who did not meet the college’s goals of more diverse and better-quality students.”
In the same article Nancy Bekavac, president of Scripps College, emphasized how important the merit aid she received from Swarthmore College in 1965 had been to and for her.
It boosted her confidence to know she was joining a community of scholars. In a published remembrance of her college days, Bekavac recalled learning that the scholarship committee did not know until after it made its decision that her father had just died. “That meant that I was judged more or less on my own merit and that the scholarship was not a kind of consolation prize,” she said.
Critics of race-based aid and admissions often make the same point.
John, this article reminds me of a theme in my own research and understanding from the internal U-Michigan archives. Universities prefer to collude on setting tuition prices, rather than compete. Merit-based aid is merely a form of competition by lowering prices. Back in the 80s there was a move to enforce anti-trust law on the universities, which started with the Ivy League. The “University lobby” quickly circled the wagons and the movement went away — why not hold universities to anti-trust provisions.
I wonder if these same administrators that say merit-aid is a zero-sum game with financial aid (which could be reformed with dramatic effect, but I won’t go into it here) say the same thing about race-preferences being zero-sum (of course, they don’t). Ironically, race-preferences benefit the rich too, because universities don’t have to worry about trying to get poorer minorities in a wider socio-economic program net and they can continue to use the morally defunct system of legacy and VIP preferences because the left and wealthier elites see this as part of a deal-tradeoff. Knock out one leg of this perverted table, and the others will collapse on their own.
Some people think that FINANCIAL aid ought to be based on FINANCIAL need? How silly? What correlation is there in FINANCIAL aid and FINANCIAL need? Clearly, race and ethnicity is the better criteria. Obviously, the children of Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Michael Jordan, etc. need government handouts, but an orphaned white kid, or an Asian refugee from Vietnam, they deserve nothing. Such thinking is the (il)logic of the left, apparently.
Massa ?!?