The article is about merit aid. It's the usual privilege stuff. If we stop rewarding exceptional students who "don't need aid" we're going to see fewer exceptional students, and that's bad for society.
Gifted kids disproportionately benefit society per dollar as compared to the rest. If you assume that competence has a normal or pareto-like distribution then it makes sense to allocate a lot of your money for merit based awards. We all benefit.
What marginal benefit does a person with Merit aid going to Dartmouth or Carnegie Mellon over Binghamton or Pitt have to me? Hell, I’d even say giving them government backed loans or other aid doesn’t benefit me.
We need a radical reallocation of capital away from the folks that are already doing the best at the expense of the rest of us and towards people and institutions that foster social and economic mobility. Ending government backed loans to all non-community colleges or in state public programs would be a start.
If we have fewer exceptional students, perhaps we would have exceptional people that would do exceptional stuff instead. It's not necessarily a bad tradeoff.
Wouldn't it make more sense to have all scholarships based on merit and need? Using either alone as the criteria seems like it would be strictly worse in all cases. Am I missing something obvious?
Are you inferring that exceptional students are exceptional because of financial aid? Is it your belief that college financial aid is why they are exceptional or the primary motivation for striving to be so?
Gifted kids disproportionately benefit society per dollar as compared to the rest. If you assume that competence has a normal or pareto-like distribution then it makes sense to allocate a lot of your money for merit based awards. We all benefit.