Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America

Need-Based Or Merit-Based?

Reviewed by Michael B. Paulsen

Rupert Wilkinson.
Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005

In his new book, Aiding Students, Buying Students, Rupert Wilkinson presents a superb history of student-aid policies and practices in a dynamic environment influenced by social, cultural, economic, and political forces. Wilkinson pays particular attention to the history of need-based aid, relative to merit-based aid, and uses the evolution of student-aid practices at a group of the United States’ elite private colleges to illuminate the central roles of need and merit, the interplay of missions and markets, and other key themes. These colleges were often the first to confront the daunting challenges of creating effective student-aid policies and were the architects of many antecedents of modern student-aid practices.

Wilkinson demystifies and clarifies the apparent complexities of contemporary student-aid practices by revealing their historical precursors and demonstrates that most of what appears new in modern student aid is merely a contemporary form of the student aid first practiced long ago. For example, grants, loans, and work aid have clear origins in the Middle Ages and in the colonial United States, and the current tension and debate about colleges’ increasing use of merit aid to attract talented students relative to their use of need-based aid to meet students’ financial needs is a longstanding conflict with medieval roots.

Wilkinson writes in a lively and engaging style, using anecdotes and detailed case studies drawn from archival work at 41 institutions and from interviews and correspondence with 475 individuals at 129 institutions from 1990 through 2004. No technical knowledge of the field is required to appreciate the author’s stories about student aid. The book provides an excellent opportunity for nonspecialists to become well informed about what really goes on in the world of student aid. But even student-aid specialists will find some surprises about the historical antecedents of their own modern-day practices.

The book is arranged into three parts. Part one, “The American Way of Student Aid,” presents concepts, themes, and historical precedents that provide useful perspectives for understanding the contemporary roles of student aid. Wilkinson adopts the analytical viewpoint that student-aid practices have evolved in response to the interplay between the ideology of institutional missions and the external forces arising in the markets in which colleges pursue their missions. For example, market forces can promote changes in student-aid practices that contradict or compromise institutional missions to expand opportunity and achieve excellence, while adherence to mission without adjustment to market changes can threaten institutional survival in terms of enrollment, budgets, image, or status.

In part two, “The Way of Elite Colleges,” Wilkinson traces the “rollercoaster” history of the tradition of colleges providing need-based aid relative to merit-based aid from colonial times to the modern era. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the American Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, and Jacksonian democracy promoted westward expansion of colleges charging low tuition and providing charitable aid, both to help the needy and to build their enrollments. Between the late nineteenth century and the Great Depression, beliefs in American individualism and social Darwinism produced concerns about using student aid “for shoring up the unfit rather than rewarding the fit and vigorous through competitive struggle,” resulting in increased use of merit-based scholarships and self-help aid such as loans and jobs. By the late 1940s, postwar inflation led colleges to raise tuition, and the influx of veterans slowed, prompting society to demand “wider social access to college”; therefore, colleges felt more pressure to provide need-based aid and to use aid as a weapon in expensive bidding wars to recruit the most talented students. In the 1950s, several elite private colleges established the College Scholarship Service and reduced the expensive use of merit scholarships to compete for the best students.

By the mid-1970s, most of the remaining features of higher education and student aid in the modern era were established. But Wilkinson pulls back the curtain to reveal the insider’s view of the contemporary student-aid enterprise. His interviews with financial-aid officers reveal a persistent professional angst and ambivalence among them, especially in response to some of the new market-based strategies that became common by the 1990s. Indeed, Wilkinson reports that “financial aid officers have admitted to me that they would prefer not to give merits or do academically based preferential packaging if they could count on other colleges not to do so either. But usually, of course, they cannot.”

Part three, “Reforming the System,” draws together the study’s findings and presents lessons and proposals for changes in government or college policies to “make advantaged institutions more open to disadvantaged people—not by stepping outside history but by tapping into past experience.” Wilkinson proposes that the government pressure elite private colleges to expand access by publishing annual lists of the richest institutions in endowment per student and ranking  them by the percentage of low-income undergraduates each enrolls—what he calls “showing and shaming.” For all of its strengths, the book also has limitations. Wilkinson barely mentions student aid at historically black colleges, less-selective private colleges, or regional public colleges, and he pays only modest attention to public universities. However, because the long-standing tension between need-based and merit-based aid at the campus level is a central theme of this book, it is particularly disappointing to find that the history of today’s state merit-aid programs receives little attention. Wilkinson does mention the state scholarship programs initiated by Cornell in New York and by Rutgers in New Jersey in the 1860s as well as New York’s Regents Scholarships initiated in 1914. What can we learn from these precursors of modern state merit-grant programs? What principal arguments or rhetoric were used to justify these early state merit-aid programs? What were the characteristics of subsequent state merit-aid programs that served as continuous bridges to today’s programs? These questions could have prompted an analysis of the history of state merit-grant programs and how the arguments in favor of or against today’s controversial state merit-aid programs have evolved.

Michael B. Paulsen is professor of higher education in the Department of Educational Policy and Leadership Studies at the University of Iowa. He can be reached by e-mail at michael-paulsen@uiowa.edu.

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