For most middle class families, college debt is only avoidable
with significant merit aid. (Okay, this is also not really what I think most people mean by "rich" either; that is, two parent incomes in the well-paid professional category can readily push a parental income into the 200K+ range but that family still has a budget and thinks before they spend. KWIM? Now, RICH-rich is another story.)
So no, I don't consider merit-based scholarship awards to UMC kids to be "stealing" from the deserving low SES kids, necessarily. Assuming that the evaluation of "merit" is meaningful and a good proxy for whatever it is that colleges are interested in, that is.
For me as a taxpayer helping to support public universities, my preference is for
mostly merit based aid, and mostly determined on the basis of likely college preparedness and COMPLETION rates. The data is out there-- it's just that we don't particularly care for what it tells us.
I seriously doubt the predictive power of most EC's to predict those things-- those wind up being proxies for SES; and yes, SES has predictive value all by itself. Maybe not because those kids are
smarter inherently, but they are almost certainly
better prepared.We can't fix this particular problem with post-secondary money. By then it's too little too late. We're trying to remediate nearly two decades of intellectual neglect at variable levels. It's like thinking that food security issues begin at 18 and that we can "fix" early childhood malnutrition by making up for it in young adults. No wonder that isn't particularly successful.
I sure wish this problem were as simple as need-based versus merit-based-- but it's not. Many of the kids who SHOULD get merit-based aid have been denied the supports that would get them there. There's little doubt about that. It just seems to be so darned intractable a problem to
solve.
