Why is financial aid tied to family income? Why isn't it granted in order of merit?
Under the current system, if the most meritorious student's family makes over $130K, he/she is saddled with debt, regardless of how good he/she is.
Under the current system, if the most meritorious student's family makes over $130K, he/she is saddled with debt, regardless of how good he/she is.
You'll have a few outliers who kill it in secondary/middle/high school, but for the most part, people who are less well-to-do perform less effectively, and there's more and more research pointing to the likelihood that survival pressures negatively affect academic performance. Maybe not alone, but they're likely connected. (Edit: tylerho references this here—https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18018383)
Good starting point: https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/widening-academic-achievem...
Basically, if the goal is fairness, merit only fulfills this when other pressures are relieved. This includes racial and income inequality.
"Hey why is your school almost 100% white when they are only 40% of the city's population? Why are they no black people? Implement a merit based system, of the color-blind variety!"
result
"Hey, your school still has no black people and its 70% asian!" Asian population represents 10% of NYC.
Always an entertaining case study.
Nice to see some studies into possibly more inclusive and holistic solutions
I grew up dirt poor. By the time I was in high school I had figured out I needed to do honors classes etc, but kids in families with resources started doing those classes in 7th or 8th grade. A doctor or lawyer understands the value of education for their 12 year old far more than a janitor. Many schools weigh GPAs more heavily for those in honors classes, so even if you're on even footing intellectually, you can't catch up. In other words, we're talking about the merit of the parents' involvement, not the merit of the student.
Now if we can redefine merit to be a raw IQ test at age 16, I'm all for it.
> Under the current system, if the most meritorious student's family makes over $130K, he/she is saddled with debt
Family income probably also speaks to how much they could contribute to the education cost. While in high school they likely had nicer cars and clothes and phones than the kid whose family made $30k.
True equal opportunity would grant aid on a merit system. Unless your argument is that familial wealth impacts merit, which I'd like to see evidence of, it's the fairer way to administer aid.
There's just assloads of studies showing high correlations between familial wealth and pretty much every measure of academic success we have ("merit", in your parlance).
I mean just searching "wealth impact test scores" on Google returns like 20 results that'll give you the evidence you're looking for.
Or are you saying your definition of "best" includes familial fiances of the applicant? Why doesn't https://www.headlightlabs.com/ include applicant's finances as a parameter?
Definitely feel free to point me to the studies showing familial wealth has no effect on whatever "merit" might mean to you, though. I've shown you how to find plenty to the contrary.
"[L]anguage variation may increase the cognitive load on students who speak AAE and thereby affect their understanding of and the speed with which they work through STEM texts. They examined the relationship between the linguistic complexity of math word problems and success in carrying out the computation for 75 African American second graders. They found a statistically significant effect for possessive –s (e.g., ‘my mama house’ vs. ‘my mama’s house’) and 3rd singular –s (‘He eat a lot’ vs. ‘He eats a lot’) on the students’ math performance: for students who were highly affected by linguistic differences, about 15% of them would have answered 94 more questions correctly (about 9% of the total) if these linguistic features had been removed. Terry et al. suggest that some AAE-speaking students face an added cognitive load on their working memory when they read and process math word problems, due to language variation – and time spent ‘translating’ while taking standardized tests is time lost."
It says nothing about the merits of knowing a second language.
How do you define merit?
A family with a higher income are in a better position to leverage their means into a better education and conductive environment. From a systems point of view, you want to balance this out by boosting families or persons of lower means to equalize the opportunity to actually engage in the meritocracy. Subsidizing purely on test scores or similar tends to favor families that already have a high income.
I live in the Rice U neighborhood. (Museum District). I'm very familiar with Rice. Believe me, if your hypothetical student really were the "most meritorious" student at Rice University, she would already have a full ride scholarship.
And if your "most meritorious" student at Rice University does NOT have a full ride scholarship, then she is not the "most meritorious" student at Rice.
The types of financial programs in question are for students who are qualified enough to get into Rice, but whose families are not well resourced enough to pay for Rice. These sorts of programs are laudable, and they are exactly what we need to be doing. There are "country bumpkins" from Angleton and Nacogdoches who are as ready to enter Rice as the sheltered kids behind the gates down Sunset in Houston. It's a GOOD thing that Rice is affording those less privileged children that opportunity.
What is your recommendation to companies that go to Rice for hiring? Hire the best - whatever their objective definition of best is (which I presume doesn't have a privilege filter)?
If it's for CS, don't bother. The kids're mainly set on FANG and while they're somewhat skilled the ones that show up at fairs are pretty milquetoast.
If you want the smart ones who aren't risk-averse, look at who's drinking at Valhalla. Also, look for graduates of Wong's 410/415 sequence if it's still offered.
True.
If it's for CS... get an Uber or Lyft from Rice University to Hobby Airport and get on a plane to San Fran so you can go interview the Stanford grads instead. Those guys are second to none.
It's more that, as a hiring fair thing, you're gonna be running up against the folks that are looking for enterprisey (say, Schlumberger) or FANG jobs. The culture there isn't one that is super startup-friendly.
???
Who cares?
The object here is to get talented people an education. What they do with that education is their decision. The owners of your hypothetical company can do whatever they please with the educations they have obtained over the course of their lifetimes. And the students, who now have an opportunity at a cost free education, can similarly do whatever they please with the educations they obtained.
It's called freedom. Take all the educations we've been providing and go out and enjoy all the freedoms you have.
Maybe I'm not understanding your view correctly? What, exactly, is the problem with allowing poor or middle class students into Rice at a reduced rate? (Or even free in most cases)?
>if the most meritorious student's family makes over $130K, he/she is saddled with debt, regardless of how good he/she is.
No. It means they won't qualify for this tuition break however they will have access to merit-based scholarships.