Rewarding success has somehow become an evil that this country needs to address. Let's start with merit scholarships.

Ok so now that I got that out of my system, below is an opinion piece about how merit scholarships are stealing from low-income families. But in my opinion, this guy completely disregards the point of merit scholarships, which is to provide motivation for anyone to do well so they can go to college for free.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/20/opinions/college-merit-aid-steals-from-low-income-students-levy/index.html

Whose fault is it that those with higher incomes take advantage of these scholarships because they are successful? Again, merit scholarships are there to provide motivation to do well in school.

In high school and middle school, you see the same thing with ideas such as extra credit projects. Teachers, and maybe Smath74 can back me up here, provide extra credit projects in many instances to help those that have lower grades increase their grades. They have to open the extra credit up to the entire class though, and the students that end up doing the extra credit are the ones that don't really need it to start with.

But to say that we should remove financial aid to those that do well in school is ridiculous and just indicative of a course to move more toward...."why even try hard if you can get it for free without doing the work."

Again this is just an opinion piece, and this post is my own opinion piece, but I just can't help but facepalm this whole idea.

4/21/2016 11:17:02 AM

did you read their argument? their claim is that diverting need-based aid to freshman year merit based scholarships is an almost intentional loss-leader to get students who don't need merit based aid, so when you say that we shouldn't remove financial aid that's a point that the opinion agrees with.

i don't know enough about this issue, but it doesn't seem like you read beyond the headline

[Edited on April 21, 2016 at 11:25 AM. Reason : .]

4/21/2016 11:25:33 AM

Quote :

" Whose fault is it that those with higher incomes take advantage of these scholarships because they are successful? Again, merit scholarships are there to provide motivation to do well in school."

You might have a point if all students had equal access to a quality education needed to earn a merit scholarship.

4/21/2016 1:54:22 PM

Quote :

"Again, merit scholarships are there to provide motivation to do well in school. "

The piece you linked to explicitly refutes this and claims that merit scholarships are being used, not to motivate or reward, but to attract kids whose parents have money.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a merit-based scholarship; used properly, it does reward and motivate.

But using these bait-and-switch, loss-leader tactics to draw in monied families is shitty. Attract family with enticing $4,000 offer. Once the kid has been there for a year and is unlikely to transfer, take that merit aid away and apply it to attracting a new rich family. And do all of this at the expense of need-based aid that allows smart poor kids to come to school.

It's not illegal, I don't even think it should be illegal, but it is shitty but I'm fine with announcing that it is shitty.

---

Now let's look at a bigger question here, which is how we reward/punish adults for their behavior when they were minors.

As a society we have decided that people under 18 (or 16, or whatever depending on state) are not fully developed, functional people who can really bear responsibility for their actions. This is why we have a juvenile justice system, it's why we don't let kids vote or serve on juries, it's why they can't drink or smoke, and a myriad of other restrictions we put on young people.

But even though we don't think them capable of filling out a ballot -- which, in the case of the Republican primaries, is filled with people who are less intelligent and mature than most of us were at 16 -- we expect them to make reasoned decisions about their behavior based on how it will impact them five, ten, fifty years in the future, often in ways they cannot possibly be expected to predict or understand.

Yeah, we try to explain to young people how their actions will affect them down the line, but I can't blame them for not paying attention to society when society has lied to them their entire lives, from the existence of Santa Clause to sex and drug education. And even when parents and teachers do tell the (mostly) truth that hard work and study will be rewarded, it certainly looks like a lie.

So in spite of all the reasons we shouldn't punish poor school performance in minors with a lifetime of disadvantage, we do. And we do because we pretty much have to. I do understand how scholastic performance is currently the only useful, available metric in deciding what opportunities open up after graduation.

But I do think it's something we should be having a conversation about, and there are changes we could make to lessen the negative impacts of the system -- improving the availability and reputation of GED programs, for example, and streamlining late college entry or retraining for people who get out of school as fuckups, realize the corner they've painted themselves into through poor school work, and decide -- as clearlheaded, developed adults -- to take a different course. And we can rethink how we talk to minors about work, success, and a lot of other things.

[Edited on April 21, 2016 at 2:21 PM. Reason : incentives are good if they're good incentives, basically]

4/21/2016 2:20:30 PM

I'm all for retooling how we think about secondary and higher education. I think it is a shame right now that, at least in North Carolina, it seems like the goal for all children (yes, to ultimately graduate HS, but) is to go to some type of college afterward. I think this is wrong and it clearly puts at a disadvantage many students who would do very well in some type of vocational study. Unfortunately, many of those students only come to realize this after wasting a couple of years after graduating (or dropping out). If we had a better career counseling center that could really identify strengths and weaknesses of students and steer them in the right direction, we wouldn't be wasting so much money on college dropouts.

But to dtownral, I said in the OP, this is also my opinion, and I don't necessarily agree with the author.

However, these scholarships that only award for the freshman year also need to go. A low-income student who received one of these freshman-year-only scholarships would find themselves SOL their subsequent years.

But how do you fix this problem? These scholarships are available to every one. How come there aren't some low-income students that are able to get them? Is it really because mommy and daddy can afford tutors for the rich kids? I get the whole socioeconomic background for the low-income students, and realize that the hurdles they face to get to the scholarships are much harder to overcome. But I'm just tired of the standard solution of "throw more money at it." Because it just doesn't work. Work smarter, not more expensively.

You want to make effective change in a school system? Don't throw money at the problem, throw unique ideas. Like the one below:

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/03/461205086/the-superintendent-who-turned-around-a-school-district

This is brilliant on so many levels. Parents who can't afford their own washer/dryer, or can't afford Laundromats, can use this idea to have clean clothes for their family. At the same time, it gets parents inside the schools, around the kids, and gives them a better chance to get involved. And all this done at a minimal cost to taxpayers.

But to say that merit based scholarships are wrong just because children from well-to-do families take advantage of them for me, is a little ridiculous.

4/21/2016 3:05:09 PM

I mean shit, that system gives out 8,000 pounds of food each month! And I bet it is all donated. Think, if our middle and high schools around town asked the middle and upper class families to bring in a few cans of food each month for the pantry, to be distributed amongst the school system, how far that would go to help out.

[user]Anderson talks of "removing barriers" like the barrier of hunger. The district has a food pantry that gives out 8,000 pounds of food each month. Between 200 and 400 families are getting food from the schools, she says.[/user]

And free health care at the schools? Genius. Why attach these free clinics to hospitals where people would have to voluntarily travel for minor things, when at least some family members are compelled by law to go to school? Only advantage I can think of is for the doctors to not have to travel far for their pro-bono work.

Actually, this is waay off topic from the OP...perhaps that NPR link needs its own thread, to discuss how we can improve schools. Thoughts?

[Edited on April 21, 2016 at 3:11 PM. Reason : asdfa]

4/21/2016 3:10:15 PM

Quote :

"But to say that merit based scholarships are wrong just because children from well-to-do families take advantage of them for me, is a little ridiculous."

I don't think that's what anybody is saying.

What the piece you linked to is saying, and what I am agreeing with, is that some universities slap the "merit-based" label on what are essentially rebates designed to entice wealthier families rather than qualified students who don't have money. The much smaller "merit scholarships" of this type are not going to entice many low-income smart kids, because they don't nearly cover the cost of going to school. But they do appeal to families who can afford college because they look like a big money-saver.

Quote :

" How come there aren't some low-income students that are able to get them?"

You're smarter than this. Obviously some low-income students can get them but, as I said, a $4,000 merit scholarship doesn't do them much good. In spite of that I'm sure some lower-income students use merit scholarships as part of a patchwork of financial aid that allows them to go to college. But obviously the vast majority of beneficiaries are going to be people who don't really need it.

So then the question becomes whether we think colleges should be prioritizing people whose families can pay, or similarly qualified candidates who might need a leg up. As a matter of morality or simple practicality, I think most people would say, "Yes, Ewan and McKenzie were great high school students and they should get to go to college, and fortunately they can pay for it. But LaShonda and Jose were also great students who should get to go to college and they can't pay for it, so they get the money."

There are a lot of problems in this country that are only going to get worse as rich/poor and white/minority gaps expand. The kind of merit scholarships described in your piece widen those gaps, and the only good thing that can be said about them is that they "reward success" as defined by a deeply flawed and outdated education system. Need-based aid helps close the gaps, and the worse thing you can say about them is that they don't give more shit to people who already have lots of nice shit.

Quote :

" But I'm just tired of the standard solution of "throw more money at it." Because it just doesn't work. Work smarter, not more expensively."

Sometimes, simply throwing money at a problem is smarter and cheaper than the convoluted systems we've built up to address them. I suggest a possible example in the basic income thread from the other day. And while I'm not convinced that the project could work on a nationwide scale, Utah is under the impression that it has saved tons of money in the long run by just giving houses to homeless people. Yes, it's rewarding them for failure. But it also (supposedly) turned out to cost a lot less than punishing them for it.

[Edited on April 21, 2016 at 3:50 PM. Reason : ]

4/21/2016 3:46:50 PM