Ah, the Post

What a rag. You'd think these journalists could read their own charts. I don't know how to upload a picture, so I'll just explain it. The article is on the rising importance of merit-based financial aid in college as opposed to need-based. If this is a real problem, then we should thank the Post for pointing it out.

Unfortunately, the data they present doesn't support their conclusion. In the last five years, the number of need-based scholarships has declined from 404 to 104, while the number of merit-based scholarships has declined from 274 to 64. So there has been a decline in absolute terms in merit-based scholarships. And if you run the percentages (which I bothered to do), you see that the proportion of need-based scholarships was 80% in 1999, and in 2004 it had declined to.....81%. In other words, there has been no appreciable change in the share of scholarships that go the the affluent. There has been a decline in scholarships generally, which would affect the needy more than the affluent (obviously). But that isn't what reporter Jay Matthews was writing about.

So the title (and argument) of this article, "As Merit-Race Escalates, Wealthy Often Win," is a giant load of poo-poo.