Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/business/law-school-grants.html

by gamble • 15 years ago

3 1 15 years ago

lsc• 15 years ago

eh, but I thought that was the point of a merit scholarship? Rich children pay big money so that they can go to school at good (as determined by average quality of the pupil) school. I thought the idea of a merit scholarship was to get the high-achieving but not rich children in to the school?

I mean, the quality of a school, I thought, was largely determined by the quality of the students admitted, and if you are letting rich kids in regardless of ability (and let's be honest, you are. someone has got to pay for the new football stadium.) you are going to have to be pretty damn selective with everyone else to get a good average.

I wasn't good enough to get a merit scholarship, and my parents weren't rich enough to send me to a reasonably good school anyhow, but I don't see how I got any more screwed than in a system where all schools are mediocre; I mean, that's what you get when you let guys who perform like I did out of high school in; a mediocre school, and I had plenty of opportunity to go to a mediocre school as-is. Hell, for good portions of my life, my employer would have paid for the venture.

If anything, more merit scholarships (rather than just filling those slots with the next class down of rich kid) seems like a net win to me. Hell, people like me probably wouldn't get as much out of college as someone who, you know, actually did the homework anyhow.

From the article:

"57 percent of first-year students — more than 150 in a class of 268 — have merit scholarships."

Personally, I think that's wonderful. Those are all kids who would otherwise have been too poor to go to that school; so the best and the brightest of the poor get to go for free, on the backs of the rich kids who want to go to school with smart kids. Seems like a good deal all around.

Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win

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