Merit Scholarships

[Joseph N. Hall]

It doesn't need to be that nuanced. If you are running a school for
excellence, the most sensible thing is to recruit excellent students.

If you recruit students who can improve, you are running a school for
improvement. I taught Princeton Review one year and I always enjoyed
students who started out with scores well below 1000 because I knew I
could get them another 200 or even 400 points no problem (this is back
in the day of the 1600 point maximum). It was extremely satisfying to
everyone involved. But even the most confused person wouldn't send a
student who scored 1000 on the SAT to Swarthmore because he could use
the opportunity. He's just going to have to find another vehicle for
improvement. There are plenty of them. Anyone who is smart and grimly
determined can get a GRE, go to community college and max out, go to a
good state school and carry a 3.8 or 4.0, and get into a solid med
school or graduate science or engineering program. For pure
mathematics, you don't even need a pedigree if you're brilliant. This
is America and those options are always open to you, even if you have
to work two jobs and take two classes a night for eight years, or
don't make it to college before you're 30, or to med school before
you're 45. If anything, the opportunities for adult education have
broadened in the past few decades. It's just life that some people
have a harder row to hoe. You can *always* catch up in this country.
You can do it without anyone giving you a single cent or moment of
help, although there are enough generous people to be found to make
that a matter of choice. You may be embittered by the biases you
encounter and the place you started in life, but, hell, you could have
been born in Botswana. Get over it, or be prepared to listen to people
quote "Invictus" to you until you do.

I'm always in favor of opportunity and acceleration (I certainly
needed it, and didn't get it in an ideal way), but I'm not in favor of
grouping students by potential. You group by knowledge and
proficiency.

The liberalism that I embrace is the liberalism of ideas and
tolerance, not the liberalism of guilt and free stuff.

  -j

On 4/19/07, wraynop at aol.com <wraynop at aol.com> wrote:
>      Nick, it is wrong because punishing the child for the sin of the parent
> is wrong.  Each man owns his own labor, so where is it just to exclude from
> consideration the children of those contributing the highest percentage of
> their wages?  I've always felt that those who can best contribute to the
> academic life at a university are those most deserving of aid, not those
> most in 'need' since part of their tuition is paid by their contributions to
> the university and by raising the value of the education to those paying in
> full.  As an aside, I subscribe much more to the ideas of Ayn Rand than Karl
> Marx, and would be proud to be called a conservative on this forum, since
> exposure to liberalism at NCSSM helped mold my worldview this direction.  As
> I said, each man owns his own laber, so doing with it what you believe is
> right with said labor is an admirable quality, even if that form differs
> from one person to the next.