Scholarships. We all want them, but do we all really need them. One of the age-old discussions is the extent to which scholarship money is delegated towards merit vs need.

As of 2022, only 7% of students are given some form of scholarship. Predominantly these scholarships are issued to students attending private universities where base costs are heightened. That being said, the U.S. Department of Education issues $46 billion annually, mainly in the form of need-based stimulus for students living in low-income households. This figure is not surprising, but excluding government-funded scholarships, what does the distribution of outside scholarships look like?

A graph that illustrates the discrepancies between aid given by public vs private universities (educationdata.org).

It is estimated that there are around 1.7 million private scholarships issued every year, making up about $7.1 billion. A majority of these cash awards are based on merit including standardized test scores, high school GPA, and essay competitions. With these parameters as discussed in the previous installment, students who have plentiful access to support such as SAT test prep are at a distinct advantage over their peers. The same argument can also be made about GPA requirement scholarships and essay competitions as having a solid support system and resource availability correlate with receiving better grades and the assistance necessary to excel at writing essays.

Government scholarship aid based on family income level (educationdata.org).

To combat these social discrepancies, institutions have tailored certain scholarships towards different minority groups to “level playing fields” and spread scholarship distribution throughout the population. Currently, minorities receive only about 28% of merit-based scholarships which poses the question, are these efforts enough?

Some institutions have even eliminated merit-based scholarships in order to allocate more funds towards need-based scholarships, but could this shift potentially be harmful to the scholarship structure? Merit-based scholarships act as an incentive for hard-working high school and college students to go above and beyond academically and within their extracurriculars and are a pivotal element to the motivation of high-performance. Merit-based scholarships should not just be scrapped but rather reformed to encourage and empower a larger population of students.

One of the most well-known pre-college opportunities to earn the National Merit Scholarship Program. Here students take the PSAT/ NMSQT their junior year of high school and the highest performers by state receive letters to move on to the next round of consideration. Why should a standardized test weed through thousands of applicants decide who really should be a “National Merit Scholar?”

The point is, instead of deciphering if merit should remain a pinnacle of certain scholarships, maybe we have an obligation to change the meaning of merit. Yes merit should include academic performance and achievement, but it should not be capped at just that. Involvement outside of the classroom defines a scholar, and thus, should always remain superior when deciding scholarship canadates.