Government Financial Aid For Students Should Not Be Based Solely on Merit

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Scholarship money is a type of financial aid, awarded to students for their academic merit based on a mix of GPA, SAT scores, and class rank (How to get a scholarship 2011). Scholarship is not easy to get or apply nowadays as the requirements are high and based on the merit. The awards are almost always for top students. According to the statistic from The University of Virginia, 318 students applied for scholarships and only 83 are awarded scholarship (Scholarship Statistic 2011). The scholarship mentioned above was a merit based scholarship and had caused such a low percentage of students able to get a scholarship. However, some universities were concerned with the student's actual needs of scholarship. Such university is the University of Texas at Austin where they plan to shift from merit scholarship to needed-based aid by ending the participation in the NMSP (Jaschik 2009). So, scholarship should not be given based on merit. Although some people think that scholarship can be a form of motivation for students to worker harder, the government should consider giving the scholarship to students based on other criteria because proper distribution will ensure fairness, it will elevate parents and students’ financial burden and promotes students’ performance in both curriculum and co-curriculum.

Firstly, not every scholarship holder actually needs the scholarship as compared to those who actually cannot obtain for scholarships. Carey (2009) states that it is sad to see the United States of America wastes a huge amount of money providing college financial aid to students from high-income family. This shows that most financial aid is given to the wealthy students instead of the needy students and it is such a waste of fund and re...

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