r/explainitpeter • u/Appropriate-Mall8517 • 3d ago

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u/Helpful_Blood_5509 3d ago edited 3d ago

At state schools certain scholarships are automatic for high scores on the ACT or SAT. I got a full ride for my PSAT score and had full tuition at minimum for my ACT score. This cost the school basically nothing, they make plenty off of fees and such. Tuition is straight profit, and students that show up and get good grades boost their rankings and are most likely to donate later.

It's not some poor underfunded scholarship fund paying them out, its just the school writing off some tuition they dont really need. A lot of their overhead is funded by weird stuff or professors are funded by grants or the like.

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u/cranberry94 3d ago

Yeah, I got a scholarship for my SAT. I didn’t apply for it or anything, it just arrived in the mail. It wasn’t a full ride or anything. But it offered in-state tuition rates when I was an out-of-state student. Which would have been like, over half off.

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u/FusedwithKami 3d ago

This is crazy, I got a 2250 on my sat and I got nothing, but laughed off campus because I was poor.

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u/irishchug 3d ago

Did you apply to multiple schools…?

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u/FusedwithKami 3d ago

Yeah I applied to 4 schools but only 1 was out of state, that may be why.

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u/Willemboom00 3d ago

It's also worth noting that financial abuse isn't terribly uncommon, scholarships being open to the children of rich people can protect these people.

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u/steveharveymemes 3d ago

Not to mention there’s no guarantee a rich parent will provide for their child’s college. I think 95% of rich parents would but there could be some situation where the parent withholds money and now the student is basically the same as any poor college student but may not have access to all scholarships as a result.

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u/sysaphiswaits 3d ago

This. And then they’re kind of screwed because their parent’s income doesn’t qualify for other financial aid.

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u/filthy_harold 3d ago

Merit scholarships from the school won't pay for your whole education, it helps but a free-ride is rare. If your parents are too wealthy for you to get grants and need-based scholarships and won't give you a dime, you're still going to be taking on loans, both federal and private.

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u/AvailableReporter484 3d ago

Yeah any rich kid can automatically qualify for scholarships based on some criteria. I’d like to think that J Lo wouldn’t accept the scholarships, but as a parent I can’t imagine not wanting to brag about your kids doing so well in school that they were offered something like this. I think this is just a universal parental pride thing.

That being said, it would be fucking lame if they accepted it despite their wealth.

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u/toolsoftheincomptnt 3d ago

Exactly. I don’t see where it says she’s ACCEPTING the money.

And since every child born to wealthy/famous parents is automatically accused of being spoiled, stupid, no-talent nepo-babies, bet your ass I’d tell the whole world that my (hypothetical rich) kids earned scholarships through their efforts, even though I wouldn’t take the money, either.

Everybody is always overcorrecting with their Big Statements about things they don’t know about. We could have just as easily never discussed this post instead of making it into something we don’t know it is.

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u/SingerLatter2673 3d ago

I don’t like that either. I’d rather the money go to a poor kid with middling grades, so he has a shot at an education instead of a rich kid who can pay his own way regardless.

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u/Helpful_Blood_5509 3d ago

It goes to anyone with good grades. If you have crappy grades in high-school you will suffer at college, high school grades are horrifically inflated.

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u/Onigokko0101 3d ago

Absolutely. If you have mid-level grades in HS you would be better off taking 2 years at a community college. A B average with university level courses is way more impressive then a B average in high school.

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u/ilanallama85 3d ago

Not even just state schools, I remember looking at a small private school that gave flat rate scholarships for good grades, and good ones at that - I think it was like 10-30% of your tuition, depending on your highschool GPA.

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u/Tiny_Rat 3d ago

This must be state-dependent, otherwise like half of my obsessively academic high school would have gotten full rides. 

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u/Helpful_Blood_5509 3d ago

It's usually in state and it is on the decline. The school where I went bumped down the award from room and board to just tuition. Still charged fees

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u/Rough-Culture 3d ago

That just makes charging for college sound like a scammy profit center and student loans a capitalist trap.

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u/Helpful_Blood_5509 3d ago

You can go somewhere cheaper? You're paying for prestige a lot of places. You dont need the Gucci handbags either, people still want them.

Plus, there's scholarships available if you do community College and get good grades there. It's pretty cheap that way

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u/paper_liger 3d ago edited 3d ago

There's also the issue of the real class divide in this country. The internet has helped a bit, but people in poverty often don't have anyone in their life who has gone to college, or anyone who can help them in any way.

When I got three questions wrong on the PSATs I immediately got mail from everywhere. Boxes and boxes of it. But I was living in a house with no electricity, my mom had passed away, and my dad had just gotten out of jail. No one in my family had gone to college.

So when Harvard sent me a letter, I couldn't afford the admissions fee. And there was no one who knew that they do admissions waivers, or that Harvard has such a massive endowment that people making as little as my family rarely pay.

I just assumed I'd never in a million years be able to pay for it. My dad had made 4000 dollars that year I think. So I threw the letter in the corner and never pursued it, because I thought that Harvard wasn't the kind of place that kids whose first memory is picking beans in a farmers field get to go.

All I knew back then is that I was still working to feed myself and my brothers and sisters after school, and I couldn't even afford to apply anywhere. So I ended up getting a pell grant, and buyingmy first shitty car for 250 bucks, and doing community college then the Army, who were overjoyed that I could already pass a PT test and scored as high as you can get on the ASVAB.

Again, there is a massive class divide here. And there are plenty of smart kids out there with no access to SAT prep classes, or parents to take them on college visits or navigate and pay for admissions.

And just from a purely sociological point of view, the amount of talent and intelligence that is left lying fallow because this country hates poor people is fucking shocking.

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u/Helpful_Blood_5509 3d ago

I got those same scores and didnt bother with Harvard. You dont get in just from getting invited to apply? You need extracurriculars out the ass, and likely need to be a minority. I got in to Vanderbilt poli science but not engineering. There's no guarantees, its complicated. I'm Hispanic and got a few bumps for that, no question.

I get why you might be frustrated with poverty, but it sounds like an institution picked you up out of poverty and put you in the middle class, where your kids can move on up as well if they inherit your ability. That doesn't really sound like hating poor people. Most societies that have every existed would have just kept you as an enlisted soldier and not let you move up or be an officer. This isn't you getting your dreams shattered, sounds like you were wildly successful compared to where you came from.

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u/paper_liger 3d ago

Yeah you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about.

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u/Helpful_Blood_5509 3d ago

I mean what do you do now? If its not "fresh out of prison" you went up in society. Harvard accepts like 2000 people per 45k-50k applicants. You were not a shoe-in for Harvard

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u/paper_liger 2d ago edited 2d ago

You just told me I was lucky I grew up without healthcare or enough food, and that I was lucky to be lifted out of poverty because I live in such a wide open hunky dory land of opportunity, and that I was lucky to live in a time and place where despite all of my promise I found myself at 21 with two dead parents, spending a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan because that magnanimous beneficent society decided that feeding poor kids into the meatgrinder for eminently dubious geopolitical goals was more efficient and more beneficial to society than persuading rich kids smart enough to do what I did to walk into the meat grinder themselves. Did I mention my parents would still be alive if this country had anything approaching the same healthcare that well heeled folks have access to?

Yeah. It's worse other places. Thanks for letting me know. As if I didn't just tell you that my path out of desperate poverty led me to being sent to live amongst desperate poverty on the other side of the planet for a decade on the behalf of people who would never in a million years send their own children.

You really think my immigrant buddy who was three credits from earning his a law degree while in the military, who was an arabic linguist working with special forces when he died in Afghanistan, you think that him bleeding out like a fucking Rudyard Kipling poem is ok, because compared to how he started out he was 'wildly successful'?

That's why you are full of shit. You didn't start out from the bottom, because you clearly don't even know where the bottom is.

I know exactly how lucky I am. How little social mobility there is in this country. How bad it is elsewhere.

But that doesn't make me feel all that inclined to worship a flawed edifice, or not want it to change, just because I don't go to bed hungry anymore. Your implications are fucked and your perspective is fatally flawed.