Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America

Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America BY RUPERT WILKINSON VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005; 346 PP. Reviewed by Paul Marthers College and university financial assistance in the United States has existed, in one form or another, since the founding of the first institutions of higher learning. At its core, financial help to students, whether it has been in the form of scholarships, loans, and work, has been about access. How and to whom that access has been provided has a complex and multilayered history bound up in notions of merit, obligation, and social justice, involving collisions between mission and market. Yet even in enrollment management circles, that history is elusive and fuzzy, especially the era before entities such as the College Scholarship Service and practices such as need-blind admission. Rupert Wilkinson's Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America fills a knowledge gap, explaining, summarizing, and examining the peculiarly American institution that has come to be known as financial aid. Wilkinson, an emeritus professor of American studies and history at England's University of Sussex, has crafted a book that will interest students of higher education policy, students seeking to understand the history of American colleges and universities, and anyone focused more generally on the history of u.s. institutions. Wilkinson's book should be required reading for admission and financial aid officers, college presidents, lawmakers, and boards of trustees. It is the result of fourteen years of research, including discussions with 475 officials at 133 colleges. Just the illuminating footnotes, extensive bibliography, and detailed glossary of terms could form the basis of a course in American financial aid. For those who choose merely to skim the book or use it simply as a reference, the final chapter, "Reforming the System," is a wordfor-word must read. Here Wilkinson proposes policies and reiterates the complex issues shaping how college officials grapple with questions of access and bottom line pressures. Wilkinson's book is one I read with personal interest, because I am a product of post-World War II spending on higher education, a beneficiary of what was perhaps the apex of the need-based era of financial aid-I entered college in the late 19705. Without financial aid from the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, the federal government, and the colleges I attended, I would not have completed a bachelor's degree and I would not now be a dean of admissions at an elite private college. Like others in and out of higher education, I have had little more than a vague suspicion that the financial aid policies since the 19505 have not always been standard operating procedure at America's colleges and universities. Aiding Students, Buying Students dispels the numerous myths that inhabit the territory in higher education occupied by financial aid. Chief among those myths is the belief that merit scholarships have only recently re-emerged to crowd out the ubiquitous need-based financial aid. Colleges, according to this belief, were historically driven just by altruistic aims when dispensing funds to worthy students. Such a view is a romanticized distortion of the facts, according to Wilkinson. His book demonstrates persuasively that there has been a longstanding historical tension between scholarship aid for the needy and scholarship aid for the meritorious. With the earliest scholarships, officials at Yale, just to name one example, debated whether to provide gift aid, loans, work-based aid, or some combination of each. The concept of scholarship aid, Wilkinson shows, has never been far removed from American conceptions about worthiness, self-reliance, and dependence. At Stanford, for example, the original policy of free tuition was criticized by Herbert Hoover, himself a beneficiary, for lowering students'"sense of responsibility." Looking back to America's first university, Harvard, Wilkinson finds that a dominant intention behind need-based scholarship assistance was to make college affordable for the children of ministers, a primarily middle class lot. …