Merit aid to college students (original) (raw)

Merit scholarships are an increasingly popular institutional attempt to maintain both the number and the quality of students in the face of declining enrollments. This paper argues that merit aid is a bad idea, both for the society as a whole and for individual institutions. From society's point of view, merit aid will simply give financial aid dollars to students who would have gone to college anyway and will take those dollars away from needy students who might then not be able to attend. From the institutional perspective, the prospect of attracting more able students is empirically small, and to the extent that it exists, short-lived.