Addressing Scholarships’ Equity Problem

Navigating the diverse landscape of scholarship opportunities can be overwhelming for any student. It’s even harder for those who need the financial help the most: low-income students, first-generation college-goers or underrepresented racial minorities, those who often lack the guidance to find the right funding opportunities and the academic confidence to apply.

A new report from the Common App details the application platform’s ongoing efforts to address that imbalance. In the 2022–23 application cycle, officials at the Common App, in partnership with the nonprofit Scholarship America, conducted targeted outreach to first-generation, Black, Latino and Indigenous students on behalf of the Equitable Excellence Scholarships, provided by the financial services organization Equitable.

They found that students who were contacted directly were twice as likely to apply for a scholarship, and also more likely to win one: $350,000 more aid dollars went to underrepresented students who received emails than the group who did not, according to the report.

“That told us we’re introducing students to a scholarship opportunity they might not have otherwise found and applied to, and also that our scholarship outreach instilled enough confidence that they felt they could move forward in the application process,” said Meagan Taylor, Common App’s senior product manager for affordability initiatives.

Taylor said the impetus for the initiative came from research showing racial inequities in scholarship distribution.

“The bulk of scholarship funding in the private scholarship space was going to students in the highest income quartile,” she said. “Meanwhile, students who were Black, Latino, Indigenous were receiving very little funding. But when they do receive that funding, it dramatically changes their outcomes.”

The gap stems partly from the rise of non-need-based merit scholarships over the past few decades, which tuition-dependent colleges often use to boost their yield rates among wealthier applicants—essentially, tuition discounts that end up bringing in more money for the institution than providing need-based aid for lower-income students would.

Merit scholarships tend to go to white and Asian students. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, 59 percent of white students and 62 percent of Asian students at private nonprofit institutions received institutional or private scholarship money in the 2019–20 academic year, compared to 53 percent of Hispanic students and 51 percent of Black students.

CJ Powell, director of advocacy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said that institutional and private scholarships can make a huge difference for Black and Latino students, who are much less likely to have access to the kind of family wealth that pays for affluent white students’ college degrees.

“Folks of color just don’t have as much experience with those sort of wealth-generating enterprises, or at least college savings–generating enterprises, as other communities,” he said. “Assuring that [scholarships] go to the communities where that money can do the most—get them to college, prevent them from living their lives in debt—is hugely important.”

Bridging the Gap

Scholarships available only to specific ethnic groups have been under heavy legal and political scrutiny since the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in admissions in June 2023. Many universities, fearing litigation, are revising grants that were once race-conscious to be universally inclusive. And they’re pushing donors with endowed funds to do the same.

Powell said that makes efforts to work with scholarship providers outside of institutional aid more important than ever.

“With all these scholarships being shut off, and merit aid continually rising, that’s really going to hurt diversity in higher education,” he said.

Taylor said there’s an “awareness bias” at play, where students with more support from counselors and parents, who often attend majority-white high schools, have an implicit advantage in finding and winning scholarships. She said that was a problem for both students and scholarship providers.

“We were realizing there’s some disconnect between scholarship providers’ intentions and how awarding patterns are actually playing out. These scholarship providers are struggling to really get diverse applicant pools,” she said. “Meanwhile, students are struggling to go through the scholarship search process and find opportunities that are relevant for them.”

That has meant convincing scholarship providers to lower strict academic eligibility requirements or reduce the amount of work involved in completing the scholarship application, since low-income, underrepresented students tend to have more family and work responsibilities and thus less time to devote to writing supplemental essays.

“[Equitable’s] scoring rubric was really focused on academics, and what we realized is we were creating a diverse applicant pool for them, but those students weren’t getting selected,” Taylor said. “That led to some really critical conversations about their priorities … So Equitable actually revamped their scoring model. It does still prioritize academics, but they upped financial need as the core criteria that they were looking at.”

Common App’s outreach efforts had a significant impact on the diversity of the Equitable Excellence Scholarship’s applicant pool as well, boosting the number of first-gen applicants by 12 percent and underrepresented minority applicants by 13 percent.

But even if low-income and first-generation students know about a scholarship, they often won’t follow through, Powell said.

“Students are counting themselves out and giving up before even trying,” he said. “Making them feel more confident, like they are truly valued within the process, can go a long way.”

Taylor said reaching out to underrepresented students seemed to increase their self-assurance, encouraging them to apply where they might otherwise have demurred. Common App explicitly used language to boost students’ confidence or tell them they’re eligible based on data that had already been collected, such as GPA or prospective major.

“I think that students often stop at having to do the guesswork of reviewing the eligibility criteria and self-assessing. But us telling them, ‘You’ve already provided us information that indicates that you’re eligible’ was really crucial,” she said.

Taylor said Common App wants to continue leveraging its considerable data on prospective college applicants—and its widespread name recognition—to address the scholarship equity gap. This past application cycle, the platform went beyond email outreach and introduced a new tab on students’ Common App profiles recommending a list of potential scholarships, tailored to their academic interests, region and demographics. Taylor said officials are in early planning stages for a similar initiative with college and university partners that would connect students with institutional grants.

Increasing diversity in scholarship recipients is a necessary and worthwhile goal for higher ed, Powell said. But the more impactful move for colleges and universities in a post–affirmative action world would be to make significant investments in need-based aid over merit aid, he said—something many selective institutions have done in the past year.

“If we don’t increase our need-based aid to match some of these losses in scholarships, we can’t ensure that there continue to be affordable pathways to higher education for all,” he said.