What do Grace Beverley, Ronan Farrow, and Bill Clinton have in common besides coming from wealthy, well-connected, and, let’s be honest, very white backgrounds? Before you think too hard, I’m just going to tell you: they are all scholarship kids.

Despite the common assumption that students on financial aid are a bunch of token minority kids from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, the majority of pupils receiving scholarships are actually affluent white children.

A couple of heads might be exploding at this revelation and trust me, mine did too, but it’s absolutely true. This trend isn’t limited to the United States where education is infamously expensive, turning wealth into a barrier to accessing it. It is also apparent in the UK, revealing a wide-reaching and deeply entrenched system where students with more means get a larger share of funding and resources. Make it make sense, am I right?

Talent-based scholarships, sometimes also known as merit aid, are financial awards granted to students based on their performance in academia, athletics, or extracurricular endeavours such as playing an instrument with astonishing skill, or coding the next potential Instagram.

These scholarships make up the majority of funding offered to students each year, meaning that only a small portion of financial aid given out annually is need-based aid, which is awarded in accordance with a student’s financial struggles.

At the heart of this conundrum lies the question of how we measure skill and achievement. Some might be tempted to argue that low-income students could just join a sports club, work hard to excel at academia or master an instrument to secure a spot at prestigious institutions.

However, this argument ignores the truth of our shattered meritocracy: wealthier students often benefit from access to private tutors, summer courses, personal coaching, money for equipment, or parents with enough free time to drive them to different cities for recitals and competitions. These advantages make them far more likely to excel at school or in their chosen extracurriculars and consequently positions them way better for merit scholarships.

We measure performance with grades, certificates, and competitions but we don’t acknowledge how these scales are already tipped in favour of those with wealth.

Someone like Grace Beverley, for instance, who is the granddaughter of a millionaire, was raised by two academics, and attended a top private school next to her extracurricular as head chorister at Salisbury Cathedral, is consequently perfectly positioned to earn a choral scholarship to Oxford University for her extraordinary singing skills, whereas a student from a low-income family can’t be expected to compete with this kind of support.

Yes, a student from a low-income background might be naturally talented at singing, shooting balls into a goal, or playing an instrument. However, without the appropriate resources to train and develop this raw talent—such as coaching, equipment, or sufficient free time—it is simply unrealistic to expect to achieve the same standard.

Just think about it: they might be juggling a part-time job, caring for siblings, struggling to manage their schoolwork without any additional help, or simply attending underfunded schools with fewer extracurricular opportunities that could impress an admissions officer at Oxbridge, or an Ivy League school. Their teachers might not even make them aware that something like a choral scholarship exists (I certainly didn’t know).

The bottom line is that this system rewards those already poised for success, perpetuating a cycle where merit or talent-based is often just another word for privilege. Truly disadvantaged students, on the other hand, who might be struggling socially and academically precisely because of this lack of resources are more likely to be overlooked and left behind.

Thus, the common belief that scholarships are routes to opportunity and resources for underprivileged students is untrue. In reality, the students who would benefit the most from mentoring, guidance, and funds for development are not receiving it.

Universities distribute aid the way they do because well-to-do families usually bring the institutions more tuition dollars than their lower-income peers—most merit aid is actually unfunded, meaning that it is derived from tuition revenue and awarded as discounts.

The schools also just want the best in terms of talent or academic performance so achievement-oriented scholarships are the best way to attract students who offer this.

Besides, the distinction between need-based and merit-based assistance is largely irrelevant for most institutions, as both types of aid often come from the same funding source.

Still, this has raised the fear among many educators that the money for further increases in merit-based aid will be culled from the pool of need-based financial aid available exclusively to students from lower-income families.

In a New York Times essay by the education researchers Martin Kurzweil and Josh Wyner, they outlined how more than half of the 339 public universities in the US sampled in a paper published by New America at least doubled the amount they spent on merit aid from 2001 to 2017.

More than 25 per cent even quadrupled the amount and roughly two out of every five dollars these schools provided in institutional aid went to students the government deemed as able to afford college without assistance.

Then there are also problems we could call attitudinal: a survey conducted by higher education consulting firm Art & Science Group in November 2023 found that students consider exclusively need-based financial aid packages unappealing. Instead, students of all income classes showed a strong preference for financial aid packages that included at least half merit-based aid.

Of course, this is built on the perception that need-based aid is ‘charity’ and a ‘hand-out’, whereas talent or merit-based aid is ‘deserved’ and ‘earned’.

These results clearly reflect how we have been conditioned to overlook differences in class and wealth to believe that success is achievable merely through hard work and willpower. Why have we not fully disillusioned ourselves from this girlboss myth yet?

Of course, this is built on the perception that need-based aid is ‘charity’ and a ‘hand-out’, whereas talent or merit-based aid is ‘deserved’ and ‘earned’.

These results clearly reflect how we have been conditioned to overlook differences in class and wealth to believe that success is achievable merely through hard work and willpower. Why have we not fully disillusioned ourselves from this girlboss myth yet?

Need-based aid isn’t a hand-out. It doesn’t even level the playing field when we take a critical look at every other area of life in which students with weather backgrounds will have one strong leg up on students without resources and connections.

It’s time that we accept that scholarships clearly aren’t there to provide access to underprivileged students, they keep resources and opportunities exclusive to and concentrated within a group of people who’ve always had them.

Of course, there are a couple of low-income students who managed to compete with richer kids, simply because their talent and dedication was so exceptional: I am looking at you Cory Booker, Halle Berry, and Dwayne Johnson.

However, these few success stories should not distract us from the fact that the entire scholarship system perpetuates inequality by indirectly favouring students with wealth and resources. So let’s change that.