How Much Do I Hear For This Student?

(3 of 3)
Winston of Williams, noting that most of the colleges' financial-aid money comes from private donors, complains that "we are being pressured to use money we got as charity to compete like car dealers. The winners are the highly placed, high-income kids." The losers, says Cornell's Ehrenberg, will be "the low-income kids, those not at the top academically and students who do not have as much information on how to play the game." And the disparity will only get worse. The number of college applicants ages 18 to 24 is expected to increase a total of 1.6 million by 2015, and of those new applicants, 80% will come from minority groups that tend to be economically disadvantaged.

America's higher-education system, considered the most diversified on earth, is valued precisely because of its full menu of choices--from small Bible colleges to world-class universities. If the tuition wars spread further, that diversity will suffer. "In the short term," observes Dickinson's Massa, the merit-scholarship bidding "benefits colleges because we get our numbers. But if as a result we're not able to build new buildings or pay professors, it will cost us our future." --Reported by Heather Won Tesoriero