Why Is Sanders Opposed to Merit-based Student Aid?

Bernie Sanders’s proposal on higher ed reform states that colleges will not be allowed to use any federal funds for merit-based student financial aid. Does anybody understand this at all? One would think that merit-based aid should get more funding not less.

Why would Sanders – or anybody – be so opposed to merit-based aid that he’d place it on the same level with salaries for administrators? Isn’t merit-based aid the best thing we can do for students? I’m completely confused.

Here is the exact text:

PROHIBITION.—A State that receives a grant under this section may not use grant funds or matching funds required under this section—

(A) for the construction of non-academic facilities, such as student centers or stadiums;

(B) for merit-based student financial aid; or

(C) to pay the salaries or benefits of school administrators.

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36 responses to “Why Is Sanders Opposed to Merit-based Student Aid?”

Evelina Anville

March 24, 2016

Well I’d be opposed to a merit-based system on the high school level. In other words, I’d be opposed to any system that makes high school free contingent on merit.

To me, universal high school education is fundamental and I believe the government needs to deliver it irrespective of the merit of individual students. Along those lines, it seems like Sanders has been arguing that a university education has now become as fundamental as high school education and needs to be provided to all citizens.

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valter07

March 24, 2016

Exactly, it is first and foremost a social engineering measure.
If the US is ever to emulate Europe – in most European countries tuition is nil or very low irrespective of merit.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 24, 2016
  
  With all due respect to Europe, the only students who can compete intellectually and academically with US students are educated in the UK. Everybody else is not impressive and that’s directly related to how the system is set up. These European higher ed systems are free because they are not that good.
  
  I can write more on that later.
  
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  1. Evelina Anville
    
    March 24, 2016
    
    Would you support a merit-based tuition system for high school? Or do you think high school should remain free (and required) for all students?
    
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  2. valter07
    
    March 24, 2016
    
    —the only students who can compete intellectually and academically with US students are educated in the UK.
    
    Depends on the field. I’d take German or Dutch or Scandinavian student in my field any day.
    
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  3. David P. Bellamy
    
    March 24, 2016
    
    In my experience mathematicians educated in Poland are exceptionally good. So I am very skeptickal about the assertion that people educated in Europe are not very well-educated.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      March 24, 2016
      
      I was speaking about Western Europe. As for Eastern Europe outside of the former USSR, I’m clueless.
      
      But if students from France, for instance, come to my not-very-famous-to-put-it-very-mildly university because that free education back home sucks so badly, this got to mean something.
      
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TomW

March 24, 2016

There is an argument that merit based aid tends to go students from wealthier families. The 16 year old who can go home after school, do homework and go to bed on time is likely to wind up with better grades than his/her classmate who leaves school and goes to a part-time job. Wealthy parents can also hire tutors for their kids if they are struggling with a subject.

Personal anecdote, when I was a senior in high school, the kid who sat behind me in US Government class worked after school at Burger King. Legally, he could only be required to work until 10 pm because he was under 18 and in school, but he regularly wound up working until midnight or later. Government was the first class of the day and he regularly fell asleep in class.

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TomW

March 24, 2016

I should add that I don’t agree with Bernie’s proposed ban. It’s possible to set up a merit based system that takes some of these economic factors into account. You can exclude students from very wealth families, favor students who went to schools with high poverty rates, and factor in things like after school work as a positives.

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1. Pen
  
  March 24, 2016
  
  “I should add that I don’t agree with Bernie’s proposed ban. It’s possible to set up a merit based system that takes some of these economic factors into account. You can exclude students from very wealth families, favor students who went to schools with high poverty rates, and factor in things like after school work as a positives.”
  
  -That still throws a lot of lower-middle income families under the bus. Many scholarships already follow this sort of model–there are merit scholarships available, but mostly for low-income families. Meanwhile, a middle class student that might qualify for a specifically merit-based scholarship doesn’t qualify at all for a merit-income scholarship, or other income-based grants. And woe betide the family in this situation with two or more students in college. Even public unis are becoming very expensive.
  
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2. Clarissa
  
  March 24, 2016
  
  I’ve been teaching for almost a quarter of a century and I’ve never seen any correlation between academic success and wealth. All of the academic stars in my field come from abject poverty. I went to school with children of the rich, and do I need to mention how much better I was academically than all of them combined?
  
  It’s beyond strange to me that people seriously believe that academic merit is contingent on money. The children of the very rich are actually quite handicapped in terms of academic and professional achievement. It’s extremely hard for them to make anything of themselves.
  
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  1. Evelina Anville
    
    March 24, 2016
    
    Well extreme wealth doesn’t necessarily lead to academic success. But there is a correlation between poverty and academic difficulties.
    
    For instance, students who don’t work at all (i.e. wealthy students) tend to less well in school than student who work part time. But for students who work 30 or more hours a week, academic performance tends to suffer. There are always exceptions of course but the general trend is undeniable.
    
    The same thing goes for public schools. Public schools (and any public school by definition almost always excludes the wealthy– who tend to opt for private schools) in middle to upper-middle class neighborhoods inevitably produce more academically successful students than public schools in very low income neighborhoods. Public schools in urban neighborhoods are operating on a deplorably low budget. Students from such schools barely have books or libraries– let alone free SAT prep.
    
    Does this mean students from low incomes can’t be successful? Of course not. But again, the trend is undeniable. Something like 80% of all college graduates grew up in middle – to upper class backgrounds. And it’s not because middle class students are somehow magically smarter or middle class parents are somehow magically better. There are structural reasons for this and there are structural reasons why poverty remains a cycle.
    
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    1. matt
      
      March 24, 2016
      
      The problems are not lack of funding.. its mainly poor management and many more expensive/difficult issues to treat for children who have rough home lives
      
      Absolutely agree its a major issue to fix. And maybe, MAYBE, more money is the answer (more so sctructural reforms that are needed, both within school and outside), but you need to argue then that even MORE per capita needs spent on inner city schools. It is factually incorrect to say more dollars are allocated to wealthy suburbs vs inner city schools per capita.
      
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3. Clarissa
  
  March 24, 2016
  
  Besides, why would students from very wealthy families end up at state schools? At my current university we don’t have a single trust fund holder and nobody comes to school in a Porsche. We do have merit-based scholarships but they are tiny and insufficient. I wish we had a lot more.
  
  Ideally, we’d have a system in this country where all bright kids would go to college for free and only the not-so-bright had to pay.
  
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  1. Evelina Anville
    
    March 24, 2016
    
    “At my current university we don’t have a single trust fund holder and nobody comes to school in a Porsche.”
    
    Yes. Porche driving students are in a different world. I don’t have such students at my school either. But you probably have a fair amount of solidly middle-class (or perhaps lower middle-class) students. Students who probably have to work some, who have to take out loans, but who also went to perfectly lovely suburban public high schools. Students like I was.
    
    To get my specific, I was hardly rolling in wealth growing up. When I got to college, I needed to work and take out loans. I rode the bus to get where I needed to go. But I can’t deny that some of my academic success was tied to the fact that my parents could afford to live in a nice middle-class neighborhood, that I grew up around books and libraries, and that I was able to attend a very good public high school. These are all thing that helped facilitate my success once I got to college. So my “merit” partially hinged on the fact that I didn’t grow up in poverty.
    
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  2. Shakti
    
    March 24, 2016
    
    Besides, why would students from very wealthy families end up at state schools?
    The parents refuse to pay for college and the student is under 24 and doesn’t meet conditions for being considered an independent student, so the parents’ income still counts for the purposes of financial aid. Student goes to the state university/community college because even that is cheaper if you’re paying completely out of pocket or self financing with loans.
    
    The parents are controlling as hell and would like to drop in on their snowflake unannounced to make sure their kid isn’t having sex. The state university is the closest to home so they can do that or have the kid commute from home.
    
    The parents really want their kid to be a doctor and the state school has an accelerated program for med school. If their child isn’t quite bright enough to get into US medical school they save the money for state college and then use the money to fund med school abroad (which is not cheap).
    
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The Dark Avenger

March 24, 2016

Don’t know why you bring this up now. At this stage of the primary game, his chances of winning the nomination are somewhere south of the probability that you’d win the Powerball lottery if you played a set of numbers this week.

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Clarissa

March 24, 2016

I have an inquisitive mind. 🙂

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Vic Crain

March 24, 2016

Merit-based aid does go disproportionately to affluent families. That’s been shown repeatedly in research over almost 40 years. The reasons have less to do with kids having to work after school than with quality of schools and teachers. Private schools are funded by expensive tuitions that the less affluent can’t afford. Public schools are mostly funded by property taxes, meaning that where houses are most expensive, schools have more money to spend on facilities and salaries. Affluent kids get SAT prep classes.

That was the point over the battles about school integration fought in the 1970s and 1980s — giving students from poor families the same opportunities as those from wealthy families. Ultimately, Americans appear to believe in the ideal of equality — as long as it only applies to everyone else.

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matt

March 24, 2016

So agree on the idea of SAT prep classes, vehemently disagree on private schools being more expensive. Per capita, inner city schools spend the most money, more than suburban / wealthy, and more than probably 90% of private schools. There are some private schools that are say 20-30k a year, but most private schools are $6-12k a year and less as I noted above. More than the school, it has to do with your parents, and the otehr kids parents and the nurturing environment they can prvoide easier in wealthy areas.

Still an important problem to solve, but definitely very off base to say that most private schools are good because they spend so much money per capita. More like they have less administrative overhead, less “problem” kids, and much much much more educated and involved parents.

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Shakti

March 24, 2016

If he’s operating under the idea that college truly is the new high school, this means it’s mandatory and should be “free” to most people. This also means merit is a garnish. Think of high school. For most people how well they did in middle school has no bearing on what high school they go to. It might affect the classes they take once they get there.

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Shakti

March 24, 2016

To put it another way, if Sanders believes in mandatory and “free” college, the idea of merit scholarship goes out the window because differential pricing makes almost no sense in such a setup for public universities. To take such a stance is easily understandable, while setting up merit scholarships and trying to set up carveouts devolves into endless arguments and litigation about what is merit and what is need and why this line/test/evaluation is flawed.

The differential pricing makes sense at the graduate school level because it’s seen as optional and additional education and not “OMG I must have this credential or I’ll starve while fighting off my robot/illegal immigrant competition”

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Alexander

March 24, 2016

Because if merit is determined by any sort of blind-test, objective measures, and provides no wriggle room for the subjectivity of “kid had a really rough childhood and so even though we can’t show you on paper why he deserves the money, look at his story and I’m sure you’ll agree he clearly does…”

Then the money is going to go overwhelmingly to whites, jews, and east asians, and not to blacks and hispanics.

Thus, Sanders is not going to publicly agree to something that would be political suicide for a Democrat candidate for president.

Every group must get its share of the federal pie.

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March 25, 2016

A lot of the current forms of “merit based student aid” are accounting schemes. They are not like scholarships. Here, for instance, if you have a 2.5 from HS you get free tuition but you have to live in a very expensive and I do mean very expensive dorm — so they get the money that way, and it is in a fund where they can do anything they want with it (e.g. build more money-making things with it, as opposed to buy books for library which is the kind of thing they would have to do with state money).

Just having no or low tuition is much better. US students were better than European ones back when tuition was little or nil, and have become worse since tuition was instituted and got so high.

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March 25, 2016

“Merit-based aid” is also slight tuition discounts or partial of waiver for out of state students, so that you get them (instead of in state students) and they are still paying more and/or spending more total money than an in state student would.

In sum, it sounds innocent and good but is in fact part of entrepreneurialization.

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Clarissa

March 25, 2016

I think the whole thread has been derailed into discussing entirely accidental issues. If the proposal said, “College should be free, period”, that would be one thing. There would be absolutely no need to single out merit-based scholarships if no scholarships at all existed as a concept.

Here, however, something entirely different is going on. The proposal doesn’t reject the idea of a scholarship. It rejects a very specific type of scholarship. And that’s what I wanted to discuss.

For instance, at my department we have a $1,500 scholarship we give to one of our majors in the 3rd or 4th years who has a combination of a high GPA, a good essay in Spanish and is recommended by our faculty members. That’s the merit-based aid I’m familiar with. Even if the tuition were eliminates, students can still find a lot of uses for the money. For instance, it could be used for books or study abroad, etc. My question is: why should something so good be eliminated? What goal will that achieve?

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1. ZZ
  
  March 25, 2016
  
  No, that kind of small scholarship is not what this is directed to — it’s funded differently.
  
  There is all kinds of merit based aid, from all sorts of different organizations. Your department’s scholarships will be from peoples’ legacies, things like that.
  
  This proposal is about uses of a specific kind of grant. “A State that receives a grant under this section may not use grant funds or matching funds required under this section….”
  
  The point is: certain kinds of “merit based aid” actually enable tuition hikes. This is what this is going toward.
  
  Saying “college should be free” or “people with good grades deserve scholarships” are far more general statements, and are positions that do not contradict this proposal
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    March 26, 2016
    
    If there is not to be any tuition, why should anybody worry about tuition hikes?
    
    And if a university is to get federal money, why shouldn’t it use that money to give scholarships to deserving students?
    
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    1. Z
      
      March 26, 2016
      
      You’re being disingenuous. One of the kinds of merit based aid he is talking about is the kind that effectively enables tuition hikes. We do have tuition.
      
      Again, universities get all kinds of federal monies, for all kinds of things. There are plenty of reasons not to give it to “deserving” students, as in the example I’ve given, bring in all out of state people and not leave space in the state universities for in state students. Etc.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        March 26, 2016
        
        Within this logic, universities are lairs of scheming evildoers who need the constant hovering presence of the Good Tsar to keep them in check.
        
        I believe that reader Jones gave the best explanation of the real goal of this measure.
        
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        Z
        
        March 27, 2016
        
        No, you’re just not informed about how the budgets work, and about what is happening / has happened with the financialization of higher education over the past few years. It is not easy to understand, I will grant that.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        March 27, 2016
        
        Based on the degree of unmotivated and uncharacteristic aggression, you must be a Sanders supporter.
        
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Jones

March 25, 2016

More to the point: is this merely a tactic to establish whether he’s a Leveller or whether he’s just a suck-up for his constituency?

I think it’s abundantly clear that he’s not going to be the Democrat candidate for US presidency, but that he can continue to raise his own personal worth by continuing his candidacy, possibly on the hope that he would be named the candidate for vice-presidency.

If he’s trying to establish Leveller credentials anyway, perhaps we should name this what it is in terms of American educational naming conventions: “No Smart Child Pushed Ahead” …

Then it makes complete sense in terms of an abandonment of previous policy.

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Clarissa

March 26, 2016

Yes, absolutely. I believe this is precisely what it is.

Our part-time workers are unionized. The union is great and does wonderful work on behalf of the part-timers. However, when we wanted to give a $100 gift card as an award to the best part-timer, the union did not allow it saying that either everybody gets an award or nobody does. There is a school of thought (and it dominates both unions I’ve worked with) that no employee can possibly work better than any other. In other words, merit is not recognized on principle. I’m quite convinced that this all that this part of Sanders’s policy is based on. Or, as you say, it’s an attempt to level what can’t, by its nature, be leveled.

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March 25, 2016

Here is another way to look at it — based on how things were when I went to college, in the days of low tuition for all. The university decides on merit by deciding who gets in or not. If you get in, you have merit, and you get federal funds based on need and also federal funds that support everyone by supporting the general educational infrastructure. That doesn’t mean no merit scholarships — those come from other funds, including different categories of federal funds.

The points are two: what Vic and others say above, “merit” tends to get assigned to those who do not have (as much) need, but even more, the way certain “merit” funds are used by the financialized university.

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March 27, 2016

And this is a different point because it is about state merit funding and it is not about accounting, but look: because we give a large amount of money to well off students for “merit,” we don’t have money for basic things like libraries. And “merit” is a 2.5 GPA form high school and a 20 on the ACT. Of course, no or low tuition is great, and both need and merit based scholarships are great, but that is in the abstract. The devil — or God, if you wish — is in the details, the concrete program, the specifics.

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