Necessary Roughness

Perhaps you’ve heard by now the Whites-Only scholarship offered by the College Republicans at Boston University. Pardon me while I enjoy this a little bit; there was so much more money that would have been available to me in 1992 were I not white. LULAC, NAACP, you name it.

A couple of things. First:

Coreas said he believes that racially based scholarships are necessary to level a very uneven academic playing field.

“We have to look at the situation honestly,” he said. “Caucasians tend to have a higher per capita income than Latinos and other minorities. We have to have scholarships to survive.”

Normally, market demand would provide for cheaper instruction. The unevenness spoken here has come in part from the centralization of higher instruction into universities. This has lowered the supply of higher learning and artificially raised the price of learning. University tuition and student activity fees pay for a lot of things you don’t use.

More and more companies are also paying for their employees’ higher education. Mine will pay half of tuition and books if you make good grades. This is a great deal for both company and employee: company gets a better educated employee and knows the employee, employee gets degree with which he or she can hop to another company for whatever reason. “Co-op” in college works similarly. One is not entitled to go to a school with the best football team in the country (unless you live near Columbus, OH ).

Secondly:

But for all the talk, there are still no takers for the scholarship. The application has been available online since Nov. 7, and so far not one student has filled it out.

Now why is that? Is there pride involved? Maybe a white person doesn’t want to be known as unable to make it without this notorious scholarship? Is there social conditioning among whites, or a lack of conditioning among others, that it’s not OK to get something because of who you are?

I’d say, if you’re a white student, go grab the money. Who cares why they offer it unless they demand something strange in return. If someone else wants to make a big deal of it, it’s none of their business. If someone wants to stop the College Republicans from offering the scholarship or force them to offer the scholarship to everyone, that’s a completely different matter.