Money for the Unscholarly

Urged on by cries of poverty and appeals to charity, higher education is on the march towards bigger and better scholarship programs. Congressmen are urging their fellows to establish a half-billion dollar fund for needy geniuses, corporations are exhorting their stockholders to approve national talent searches, and educators are reminding their former pupils that the alma mater is not yet perfect. In the midst of this nascent crusade, Harvard is fortunately able to assume a somewhat holier-than-thou attitude.

The College's attitude is based on the assertion that "any able, ambitious and responsible student" can get through Harvard, regardless of his family income. Nevertheless it seems that somewhat more ability, ambition, and responsibility are required to get through Harvard if one is insolvent than if one is the son of an oil baron. Although the rules are not strict, and the scholarship scions consider each case individually, the minimum standard of performance for a scholarship holder is normally Group IV, while the minimum for a non-scholarship student is Group VI.

In an era when the College has two 'qualified' applicants for every opening, when the undergraduate at his worst is still among the top tenth of the nation in estimated ability, it seems unreasonable to assume that any student is here who does not deserve financial aid. This is especially true when the cause of Group V or VI standing is almost universally found to be either extra-curricular obligations or psychological problems. It seems deplorable that the University should force a student with extra-curricular ambitions and abilities into an unnecessarily studious pose, and even more deplorable that the College should augment the problems of those in psychological difficulty by cutting off financial support.

If, however, the College feels that two B's and two C's are the absolute minimum performance to be expected of a student, it seems anachronistic to use the endowment to support several hundred such students who are nominally 'paying their own way.'

This fact has often been recognized, and the college has deplored the fact that it could not use the same academic criteria for scholarship and non-scholarship students, while pointing out that it had no money for more scholarships. This need no longer be the case.

At present, a student either gets what he "needs" to finance his education, or he gets nothing, and is told to finance it for himself. As a result, "once a bad student, always a bad student," for the student who has lost, or could not win, a scholarship must take on so much work that his chances of a achieving grace in Group IV are slim.

Yet despite this situation, the student holding a scholarship is supported in a state little short of luxury, forced to earn only $300 a summer, and take either a $300 job or loan during the academic year. When other deserving students are forced to earn or borrow their entire upkeep, it seems the College can ill-afford such generosity. While raising the amount of work and loans required of scholarship students would undoubtedly hurt their economic and intellectual status, the harm done would hardly be comparable to the benefits given the Group V or VI student who could receive at least partial scholarship aid.

Obviously the ideal solution would be enough scholarship funds to pay the full expenses of everybody who is admissible to the college and cannot pay his own bills. But lacking these resources, the University still needs to do some rethinking of outdated principles, and abolish the double standard of performance for solvent and insolvent students.