<p>I don’t agree that students should get merit money with federal dollars either. There is not a dearth of those awards, and they tend to go disproportionally to those who need them least. Making them merit within need still is providing for those who have the most options. Pell truly spotlights where the money is most needed…</p>
<p>Pell dollars should not be redirected to Byrd. </p>
<p>Fed grants should stay need-based.</p>
<p>All the government needs to do is count the non custodial parents income on the fafsa. That would cut down significantly on well to divorced/separated families receiving large pell grants they truly do not deserve. Targeting and dealing with all of the fraud associated with the fafsa would yield plenty of money to reinstitute the Byrd scholarship.</p>
<p>Riots? Nahhh
Id bet seeing a school riot over a lost tournament/finals than financial aide or loans.</p>
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You’re skewing the question when you phrase it like this. The A student should get the scholarship while the B+ student does not, period. Family wealth should not factor into the equation. </p>
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Again, you’re separating “students who are academically talented” and “kids with families without money”. Why are you implying that these categories are mutually exclusive? One has to do with family wealth; the other one has to do with intelligence.</p>
<p>Family wealth (or lack thereof) is not something that merits free money. If a kid gets into a school that he can’t afford, he should have to take out loans just like everybody else. Having a low-income background has absolutely no effect on your ability to pay back loans (once you graduate from college, you have the same earning power as everybody else who graduated from college).</p>
<p>I don’t feel that I am skewing the question. I don’t want to pay for an A student to get a scholarship with my tax dollar without considering income.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that the government should be spending taxpayer money on merit college scholarships.</p>
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But why consider income? What does a kid’s parents’ salary have to do with his deserving of getting a scholarship? </p>
<p>Why should an A student with middle-class parents have to work and take out loans to go to school while an A student with low-income parents gets to go for free? They both graduate with the same degree (and thus, the same earning power)… so why should the kid with middle-class parents have to work and go into debt while the kid with low-income parents gets a full ride?</p>
<p>Because the $100,000-income parents can choose to give their kid a college education, while the $25,000-income parents aren’t able to make that choice.</p>
<p>You’re pretending that rich people don’t already have a massive advantage in admissions and college funding. Which is, of course, ludicrous.</p>
<p>agree with northeastmom</p>
<p>Few low-income students will perform well in college.</p>
<p>and this is your expert opinion…?</p>
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So the whole system is designed around “it might be unfair to others if some parents work hard and choose to give their kids a very generous gift?” </p>
<p>Obviously, yes, if the $100k parents choose to pay for their kid to go to school then that’s quite a perk. However, not all parents choose to foot their kids’ bills after they turn 18 (like mine), preferring their kids to be financially independent adults. In these cases, the income of the parents is completely unrelated to the financial need of the kid.</p>
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I will assume you mean “people with rich parents” here, since most college-aged students have similar personal levels of wealth (essentially none). </p>
<p>I don’t see this advantage in admissions. Do colleges consider income the way they do GPA and SAT scores (the higher, the more likely you are to be admitted)? I think that would be highly illegal.</p>
<p>I don’t see the advantage in funding either. When was the last time you saw a scholarship for “people with middle-class parents” or “people with wealthy parents”? Probably never. On the other hand, there are millions of dollars in scholarship money reserved solely for people with low-income parents. Often, these scholarships have no merit-based component whatsoever (like the Pell Grant). </p>
<p>It’s very disillusioning to a hard-working student like myself, who just happens to have parents that make a combined $80k/year or so. I have to max out my allowable part-time hours during school and work full-time every summer to be able to afford every year of school I attend. I live in the cheapest apartments I could find in my school’s city, and I have never been able to afford my own car. Despite pulling a 3.9+ in my school’s hardest major (arguably), I have never received a penny in grant money, or any scholarships with a need-based component (I have applied for many, but have only ever received ones that don’t consider parental income).</p>
<p>I have friends who are Pell Grant recipients who have never had jobs in their entire lives. When summer comes around, they don’t even bother getting a job - they just hang around at school taking more classes, since the school will give them free money to pay for it. Their transcripts and resumes show it, too: it’s almost like they take their education for granted. (get it??)</p>
<p>^ Seriously, I’m so sick of your generalizations. I’m sorry that you hang around with lazy kids (maybe they shouldn’t be your friends?) but they do NOT represent the majority of Pell kids. The Pell covers a whopping 20% of my COA. Whoopty freakin doo. I still have about $18k after the Pell to cover- which are made up of loans, some other academic scholarships, some other need-based, and my own work. I am the TYPICAL Pell student. I work my butt off in college to cover the costs that my family cannot. I’m sorry that you hang out with a bunch of lazy kids, but something doesn’t add up. Almost all Pell kids also have work-study or some kind of self-help. That they’re doing NOTHING makes very little sense. I am a grant student who holds down 2-3 jobs and manages to pull off a 3.8+ GPA while getting two degrees. I am the normal Pell student (besides the GPA as it is quite difficult to pull of that GPA and work a ton of hours as most Pell students have to do). Stop pretending like Pell kids are these lazy mooches because it’s not an accurate representation of us.</p>
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<p>Please, just stop. You’re naive to the point of ridiculous if you really think that admissions officers don’t take your income into account. They <em>depend</em> on full pay students to pay for students who can’t go without help (understandably). And they know that students with wealthier parents are more likely to donate when campaign time comes around, because they have the money to do so. And please, you don’t even need to tell them how much your parents make— all they need to do is take a look at your zip code and parent’s occupation and sometimes school district to get a really good idea how wealthy you are (all these things are included in the Common App). Of course they take income into consideration. </p>
<p>Furthermore, wealthy family often send their kids to better schools, live in better school districts with better teachers, offer them better opportunities (playing sports, instruments, etc cost money!), provide them with economic stability allowing them to focus on other things, and send them to tutors for SAT/ACT/standardized testing tutoring. All these things are beneficial to college admissions.</p>
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romanigypsyeyes, I apologize if it seems like I implied that you, or the “typical Pell student” is lazy. I didn’t mean that. I’m simply pointing out the lack of justice in a system where some undeserving students automatically get free money to go to college with, when other deserving students get nothing.</p>
<p>You sound like you work hard and study hard. You and I have that in common. The difference between us is that you do it “to cover the costs that [your] family cannot”, and I do it to cover the costs that my family does not. Do you see what I’m getting at? Just because two adults make a certain amount of money, doesn’t mean they hand any of it to their kids. Doesn’t mean their kids should be disqualified from grants and (most) scholarships. I am personally probably just as poor as you are (do you have a car, for example? I don’t.), but since my parents aren’t, I get no help from my school or the government.</p>
<p>You mentioned in another post that
As we can see, there are significantly more free money opportunities for students with low-income parents than for those without them. Now, I have no doubt that a hard-working student like yourself would be able to secure money for college regardless of your family’s income. However, this statement does not hold true for many Pell recipients.</p>
<p>It is simply not right that people with this ^ attitude towards their education are handed thousands of dollars to spend on it every semester. Keeping this in mind, would it really be so bad to cut down stuff totally based on parental income like the Pell and create a few more purely merit-based opportunities for students? Hard-working students like you would still be able to secure funding (except it would be merit-based); hard-working students like me (“cursed” with middle-class parents) would actually be able to qualify for some money, and those who don’t really deserve it would have to work or take out loans to go to school. Heck, if anything, it might help them think a little more seriously about their education. </p>
<p>I go to a public school too, and I see people abusing the grant system left and right. I know a girl on a need-based full ride who lives in the nicest dorm on campus, spent a summer studying abroad in France, and bought an iPhone with her grants one semester. I know another Pell kid that drives a BMW and has never had a job in his life. (Heck, the kid in that picture I posted went on Facebook from his phone… must be a pretty fancy cell phone! I wish I had one like that.) If these people had earned this money with their grades (or other accomplishments), there’s little anyone could negatively say about these situations: they earned it! The fact that these people were able to manipulate the system to make themselves seem poor (and therefore deprive others of funding) is just wrong though… how can anyone endorse a system in which this is possible?</p>
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Isn’t it unfair how they treat students differently based on something as irrelevant as how much money their parents make?
Oh wait…</p>
<p>It isn’t irrelevant because parents are expected to contribute to their child’s education in some form if they can. I’m sorry that your parents aren’t, but maybe you should take that up with them. </p>
<p>If they did what you wanted then you could have extremely rich people, who pay for every single thing for their kids, having their sons and daughters sucking up aid from people who really do need it.</p>
<p>That post that you quoted came from a time when I forgot about a $20k over four years academic scholarship that wasn’t yet included in my FA package. I get $5550 in pell and $5500 subsidized loans. A $5k university scholarship that is part aid and part scholarship. So the Pell is really all I get FA wise from the government.I’m sorry, but if your parents make $50k more than mine, they can give you the $5k in FA that the Pell gives me. At least as far as the government is concerned.</p>
<p>And yes, I have a car that I pay for because I needed a car to get to work while I was in high school. It is solely in my name because I’ve been working and saving since I was 14.</p>
<p>Ultimately, while you’re dependent, your education its primarily your family’s responsibility. The very small aid low income students get from the government is supposed to help bridge that. It’s really not much.</p>
<p>Also, you really do have a skewed vision of Pell kids. And with that, I’m done because I really let this issue get to me.</p>
<p>Medwell, I am answering your question as to why I don’t want my tax dollar giving an A student a merit scholarship. It is because I don’t think the government should be in the business of using public dollars to award merit scholarships for college. An A student has plenty of opportunity to get merit scholarships that use private donor money.</p>
<p>I don’t think that an A student is more worthy of being able to select a certain college, or to go to college over a B or a B+ student.</p>