Growing up I was always the nerd – that odd guy who loved school. I was fine with that. I think a solid education builds people and families as it propels society into the future’s glorious dawn. That’s why I wish ideally that so many more could have a college education. For many of us who’ve had those dreams, scholarships have helped to fulfill them. One seemingly pesky thing though we’ve had to do in acquiring that money is filling out the FAFSA, our gateway to obtaining scholarships, including needs-based and merit-based.
FAFSA stands for “Free Application for Federal Student Aid,” and if you want federal financial aid for college, this is the form to complete. According to College Board, more than 13 million students collectively who fill out their FAFSAs receive more than $120 billion every year. The FAFSA takes into account an applicants’ personal information to calculate “which students get financial aid – and how much they’ll get.”
College Board states that the FASFA is used by many states and colleges to make those decisions.
As the information applicants submit about themselves is relevant to their eligibility for aid, part of the system is needs-based. That means there are scholarships for underprivileged individuals so education can be more accessible for them. But socioeconomic status is not the only factor in the financial aid equation. It can also be merit-based, which may carry some unexpected benefits with it.
Scholarships that are needs-based provide an inroad for underprivileged individuals to make education more accessible to them, encouraging them to complete a degree without a mountain of debt to pay off. Merit-based scholarships reward hard work and sharp minds, and schools dispensing them have a shot at recruiting the best and brightest scholars of tomorrow’s workforce. These institutions obviously have great incentive to offer merit-based scholarships, such as those based on the ACT or high school GPA.
But that isn’t the only plus. Would not offering merit-based scholarships encourage students of all income levels to study harder for their tests and become accustomed to diligence in academics? If we want hard-working men and women in our workforce who apply their minds to their tasks, won’t we have more people like that if we reward such behavior from the beginning? So we see that merit-based scholarships increase the quality of students going to college in the first place.
If all scholarships were needs-based, then students would not have the extra motivation to apply themselves to both receive them and maintain them. Merit-based scholarships, on the other hand, not only benefit schools that want to look good, but they benefit the society that inherits these students as workers as well as the students themselves, as the diligence in their studies stretches their minds and prepares them for betting paying jobs.
The next time you’re filling out your FAFSA, don’t take it for granted. It may be doing wonders for you and your generation that you will never know.
