White Students Receive Disproportionate Share of Merit Aid, Report Says

shocking….

Funds should be concentrated on needs-based aid. So-called merit scholarships go to students who would have attended college anyway. Need-based scholarships tend to go to students who are qualified for admission, but would not have otherwise attended college. 

Care to cite some data that backs up your claiim that “So-called merit scholarships go to students who would have attended college anyway.”  I was one of those students and would likely not have attended, or borrowed much, much more than I did, had I not received some merit awards. 

The link between merit aid and race is two degrees of separation…merit aid is linked to academic performance, which is linked to family wealth, which is linked to race. Someone will no doubt read that and say “typical liberal dogma,” but please stop me when I get to the part that isn’t 100% true.

Merit aid is designed to help schools reach enrollment goals and meet desired academic profiles…it is driven more by US News & World Report rankings than it is on an altruistic goals to help the needy gain upward mobility. If a merit recipient happens to need the money, great. But merit scholarships are not designed to accomplish that goal, and in fact often are awarded to those who can already afford college without a scholarship.

Why are Asian Americans erased in the analysis section at the end?

It would be interesting to have someone from another planet who was unfamiliar with the history of U.S. race relations, but who had just read Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-winning book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” as partial preparation for understanding our planet, beam down to the U.S. to take a look at the discussion that this post has generated (or any like it will almost certainly bring on). Folks sometimes forget that Diamond’s book was in good part his response to Herrnstein and Murray’s “The Bell Curve” that had appeared in 1994, three years before his, to which Diamond objects in pretty strong language. Diamond’s main point is that this is an arena in which it is easy to confuse proximate with ultimate causes for group disparities, and that we need to be clear about which are which if we are not to draw some pretty destructive and incorrect conclusions.

The creature (and let’s say that on its home planet it makes its living as a logician) might point out the following:

(1) If you Earthlings ascribe a group difference to an innate differential ability to perform, making that both the ultimate and the proximate cause, then you’d better have solid evidence that this is really the case, and I see that nothing along that line has ever survived close inspection in the light of day. Thus, you’d better chuck that hypothesis right onto the trash heap on which it belongs. So, starting from there …

(2) Without a time machine, you don’t have any hope of going back and fixing the ultimate causes; you have to address the proximate ones. But in doing so, you’d better not forget that there are a lot of people who are intensely aware of the ultimate causes, and resent the fact that as a group they and their children cannot expect the same sort of life outcomes as do folks who were not damaged by those ultimate causes.  Telling them that the past is the past and that they should just get over it is not generally helpful.

(3) However, in dealing with those proximate causes (e.g., racial and ethnic group disparities in socioeconomic status), you also have to be careful about how you present and implement solutions. If you tell a person of good will who is sympathetic to the problem that part of the solution involves giving someone else’s children a benefit for which their children are not eligible and that this is to address racism, you should not discount the possibility of getting a response such as, “But I’m not a racist who needs to be punished for racism past and present, and this is just plain unfair. I want to see the problem fixed, but please recognize that I, too, love my children and don’t want to see them denied a benefit because *they* don’t have the right racial or ethnic background.” Telling them that the past requires such a remedy in the present and that they should get over it is not generally helpful.

Such an alien visitor would by now have managed to say something to offend almost everyone on both sides of this matter, and thus might be promptly deported. Before leaving, the visitor’s final words might be something like, “You know, you’re spending a lot of time quarrelling about different principles that various ones among you perceive as absolute, but are in conflict. You’d better accept that you’re never going to resolve that fully, and get on with working together to find an effective solution, since this corrosive problem you have is getting in the way of almost every advance you’d like to see your society make.”

Since this way-too-long response amounts to an excursion into the realm of science fiction, I’ll end it with one quote from the wisdom of Star Trek, a comment that Klingon Commander Kang (Michael Ansara) made on a classic episode when he ended a fight with the crew of the Enterprise because there were bigger issues at stake: “Only a fool fights in a burning house.”

“Minority students receive more need-based grants because minority students are more likely to be low income than Caucasian students.”

But Asians generally make HIGHER income than the white people.  Shouldn’t the word minority here be qualified?

Prof hacker, you rock. I teach high school students whose parents don’t really want them on Twitter but we need hashtags for our digiteen project. Understanding hashtags is an important part of digital citizenship and to teach them without it would be a problem. I know these companies want to build their subscriber base but RSS is one of the most important tools out there. IT does require higher order thinking to use them but that is what we’re supposed to teach anyway. I’m linking this to my blog tomorrow morning. Thank you!