this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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Nope. Scholarships are awards based on academic performance. Bursaries are needs-based funding without a performance requirement.
If you want to change that, you have to change the system of ear-marked private donations. Most scholarships are set up by wealthy private donors with very specific requirements for the student to meet.
How do you figure? My department has scholarships tied to a whole lot of criteria. Many are purely need based.
Public universities used to be tuition free. The government funded universities. Now it just underwrites student loans. The wealthy private donors prefer the current system because their donations give them wage slaves. They also get the added benefit of having their name on a university building.
In a sane country education is not only free, but students are provided with a small basic stipend from the government with the option of very favorable loans if needed.
And how did they perform well? Excellent and expensive schools and tutors their entire child life.
There are loads of kids from lower income backgrounds with top academic performance. There are also loads of kids from wealthy backgrounds with terrible academic performance (I worked with some of them while interning at a private school).
You’re definitely right when it comes to demographic averages but you can’t make a definitive determination on an individual basis without knowing someone’s background.
Scholarships still generally have a subjective aspect, often in the form of a short essay.
As long as there are subjective measures, there is the opportunity for abuse.
Like, hypothetically if you were an institution you might want wealthy students who's parents will be inclined to donate large sums of money... and you might recognize that if the parents are in the public eye it would be attractive to them to be able to say thier kids made it on a full ride scholarship (even though thier donations would vastly eclipse any tuition costs). You suddenly have an incentive to use the subjective component of a scholarship as justification to award the scholarship to wealthy donors to ultimately profit.
Not saying that's necessarily what happened here... Just that the argument of "that's not what they're used for" is a little hollow when they're already not being used for what they're for.
Don't you need to apply for a scholarship?
Depends on the scholarship and the university I think. At my university a donor would give the money to the school and specify the conditions of who it would go to, and the school would assign it accordingly.
That said, the school sometimes really stretched the conditions to ensure it went to a favoured student (typically the top students). I benefited from one award that was aimed at students who didn't originally grow up in <big city where main campus is located>. Donor grew up in a rural area and wanted to support students who had to move away from home to study. The problem though was that I was living with my parents, studying at <newer campus in smaller city>. I was technically eligible but it was completely against the spirit of the award. In addition, I was being given plenty of other scholarships and this one could have gone to literally anyone else at this campus.