Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America

Front Cover
Vanderbilt University Press, 2005 - Education - 346 pages

From the first scholarship donated to Harvard in 1643 to today's world of "enrollment management" and federal grants and loans, the author gives a lively social and economic history of the conflicting purposes of student aid and makes proposals for the future. His research for this book is based on archives and interviews at 131 public and private institutions across the United States.

In the words of Joe Paul Case, Dean and Director of Financial Aid, Amherst College, "Wilkinson has mined the archives of dozens of institutions to create a mosaic that details the progress of student assistance from the 17th century to the present. He gives particular attention to the origins of need-based assistance, from the charitable benevolence of early colleges to the regulation-laden policies of the federal government. He gives due consideration to institutional motive--he challenges the egalitarian platitudes of affluent colleges and questions the countervailing market and economic forces that may imperil need-based aid at less competitive institutions. By drawing on scores of personal interviews and exchanges of correspondence with aid practitioners, Wilkinson fleshes out recent decades, helping the reader to understand new trends in the provision of aid."

 

Contents

Who Got It What Shaped It 28 888
28
Enter Uncle Sam
46
The Roots of Student Aid
65
Merit and SelfHelp
97
Seeking Equity and Order III
111
Choosing the Best
129
New Strategies
142
Containing the Market
164
Appendixes
195
Bibliography
295
Index
331
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Rupert Wilkinson, former Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Sussex, England, has taught at Brandeis, Smith, and Wesleyan. Author or editor of eight other books on elites and on American culture, he has published articles on student aid in the College Board Review and the Journal of Student Financial Aid.

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