Hamilton College Ends Merit Scholarships
Hamilton College will no longer offer merit scholarships beginning with the freshman class entering in fall 2008. "We are discontinuing our merit scholarship program so that we can provide more need-based aid," said Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Monica Inzer said in announcement yesterday. "We believe we are the first college or university in the U.S. to abandon its merit scholarship program."
Inzer cited changing demographics as one reason for the change, noting that demographers predict the financial need of the college student population will increase in the next decade.
Hamilton will continue to guarantee to met full demonstrated need of 100% of admitted students. Previously, 15 to 20 students in each freshman class of 470 have also received merit scholarships of up to half tuition.
posted by Carolyn Z. Lawrence at 7:49 PM
1 Comments:
Let’s do the math.
Hamilton has 1775 students and approximately half of them receive aid (let’s say 850). To date they usually spent 20 million on need-based grants and 1 million on merit scholarships. Take 20 million and divide by 850 and the average need-based grant was $23,529. Now they plan to eliminate 1 million of merit-award that went to about 75 students. Let’s assume that 30 of those students have financial need. They now have 21 million dollars divided by 880 students the average need-based grant will be… $23,863. Wow! They feel that raising their average need-based grant by $334 or 1.4% is worth NOT recognizing outstanding academic achievement.
I suspect that most people reading the announcement by Hamilton think wrongly that the need-based awards will increase by 5%, but they forget that the pool of students needing need-based awards just increased because 75 students are now NOT receiving substantial merit scholarships. Could people at Hamilton itself have made this miscalculation?
Please correct me if I made the mistake in calculating this.
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