“If colleges must attract a larger percentage of a smaller group of potential students in the future, someone will have to pitch in dollars, especially if (institutions) need to attract a larger proportion of minority students who have historically had more financial challenges,” says UCLA’s Chang.
Kati Haycock, the director of The Education Trust advocacy organization in Washington, has criticized public flagship and other research-driven public universities, for creating “serious inequities in higher education and exacerbating disturbing trends in financial aid policy at the state and federal levels.”
The Education Trust has documented how public flagships and other favored public universities “have reallocated financial aid resources away from the low-income students who need help to go to college — mostly to compete for high-income students that would enroll in college regardless of the amount of aid they receive.” These schools spend too much on merit-based aid when they could instead devote more resources to need-based financial aid, critics charge. “These universities are spending a ton of money bringing in a lot of rich kids. There are more than enough financial aid resources to help those with the need if they stopped buying off the students with high SAT scores,” Haycock says. Chang adds that scholars have begun to take a hard look at financial aid policies practiced by both private and public institutions. “I think these studies about how best to distribute aid to increase the largest number of students will continue to be very important.”
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