

Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win - gamble
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/business/law-school-grants.html

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lsc
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.

