Chronicle of Greater Schooling Op-Ed:  Regulation Colleges Ought to Abandon Advantage-Based mostly Scholarships, by Tamara F. Lawson (Dean, College of Washington) & Heather Okay. Gerken (Dean, Yale):

One of the crucial problematic elements of U.S. Information’s rankings is the impact its methodology has on low-income college students, who want monetary assist to take the alternatives they’ve earned. For many years, academic leaders have used treasured assist {dollars} to pursue college students with scores that may ship a rankings increase. In our subject, a prime LSAT rating has turn out to be a golden ticket to monetary assist, at the same time as many establishments enable lower-income college students to wrestle with larger tuition payments. Such practices hold legislation college financially out of attain for a lot of extremely certified, indisputably meritorious candidates.

In our view, admissions choices needs to be merit-based, and standardized-test scores and grade-point averages ought to proceed to be essential components in these choices. However as soon as an applicant has earned a seat, monetary assist needs to be based mostly on want, and wish alone.

Due to the present rankings components, deans are underneath horrible strain to give attention to scores slightly than want in awarding monetary assist. Because of this, need-based monetary assist is eroding, whereas scholarship awards with out regard to want are exploding. …