Merit-based aid entices new breed of students

COLLEGE AID, page 1

1992, low and high-income students received the same average award, roughly $5,500. But by 2000, awards jumped by $1,300 for students in the highest income quartile, compared to only $700 for students in the lowest, according to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey.

"Cabrini tries to really disperse aid evenly to wealthy and needy students. We raised our academic quality and expectations last year as a means to build our academic profile. To build our profile and better the college's academic standing the college gives merit-based aid to wealthy students," Osborn said.

"More recent data suggests that the trend isn't letting up. The amount of so-called 'merit' aid awarded to students increased five-fold from 1994 to 2004, more than four times the rate of increase for need-based aid," according to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey.

Kevin Carey, an education analyst, said, "I worry that some institutions had become dependent on using merit-aid grants as they engaged in bidding wars for affluent, high-achieving students whose presence raises colleges' standing in popular magazine rankings. By doing this, colleges are failing to use their financialaid resources in ways that would maximize access for low-income students," as reported in the Chronicle for Higher Education.

Many students worry that shifting the student aid focus away from low-income students puts them at risk of being pushed out of elite institutions and out of the four-year higher education sector as a whole.

Megan O'Brien, a junior elementary education major, said, "I never thought of college as a business, but clearly here we have colleges wanting to better themselves and doing so by appealing to and targeting the wealthy students."

Other factors are also making it harder for those with less money to attend college. Measures designed to make college more affordable, such as tuition tax breaks and merit-based aid, provide a disproportlonately high benefit to families who make over $50,000 a year. This group received 43 percent of education tax credits and 70 percent of the benefits of federal tuition tax deductions in 2003.

At a College Board news conference last week, many highereducation officials criticized institutions that offer merit-based aid because, they said, the incentive tends to benefit students who would make it through college anyway.

"By essentially paying smart students to attend a particular college, those institutions waste money that could be used to help students who really need it," Amy Gutmann, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, said, as reported in the Chronicle.

According to the Chronicle,