Do scholarships have merit?

By offering merit-based scholarships, Duke stands as an outlier among the nation’s elite universities. As we learned earlier this week, Duke has the lowest percentage of students receiving need-based aid among the U.S. News and World Report’s top 10 universities. In this editorial, we consider the merits of such scholarships and a new system for allocating merit-based aid.

The reasons for offering merit-based scholarships are two-fold. On one hand, they serve to attract the best students to Duke. In the competitive world of college admissions, many of the top prospects will shop around, seeking out the most elite schools that are willing to offer the most aid. Although a very respectable university in its own right, Duke still lacks the prestige and resources of other universities that attract the best and brightest high school students. As celebrations of academic achievement, however, merit scholarships work to close that gap by offering not only a free education but also prestige and unique opportunities, such as studying abroad at Oxford University with the Angier B. Duke Scholarship program.

Merit scholarships also seek to produce exemplary alumni whose reputations reflect positively on Duke. One of the most tangible ways that this goal is achieved is through the attainment of prestigious postgraduate scholarships, such as the Rhodes or Marshall Scholarships. It is no secret that the merit-based scholarship programs provide ample resources for research and other curricular and co-curricular opportunities that groom students for postgraduate scholarships. Merit scholarship recipients at Duke receive support and mentoring from faculty, staff, alumni and fellow scholars along with extensive, exclusive interview preparation for the aforementioned postgraduate scholarships.

Though purely merit-based scholarships may not always provide aid to those who need it most, offering such need-blind programs ultimately benefits and enriches the Duke community. Merit scholarships are an important and effective means of attracting top students, who in turn share their diverse experiences inside and outside the classroom. Yet, we question the efficacy of offering resources to a very small, select group of students and not others. If pouring innumerable resources into these scholars deemed particularly talented is meant to groom them for postgraduate scholarships, then the programs fall short. Duke has seen a decline in its number of Rhodes Scholars, particularly in comparison to its peer institutions. The last student to be awarded the scholarship was in 2011.

Given the immense opportunities offered by the scholarships and the questionable efficacy, we propose to reconsider the scholarship selection processes. Each scholarship has its own process. A.B. Scholars, for example, are hand picked from the applicant pool, with no additional application, and are then selected after interviews. Yet, the metrics for assessing a student’s potential to thrive in college are limited with just a high school resume in hand. To remedy these limitations, we propose a model where all prospective scholars apply directly to their respective programs in the same way that Duke requires a secondary application. Furthermore, there should be two opportunities to apply—one prior to matriculation to attract the top candidates, and one after the first semester at Duke after students have demonstrated their achievements in the college environment. Such a selection process would create a more efficacious system in which students who desire merit-based aid will work for such an honor rather than have it fall into their lap by virtue of an admissions officer’s decision.