In my local newspaper last weekend, I couldn’t help noticing an ad where Best Buy is proudly announcing that they’ll be giving away $1.2 Million in scholarships. And while at first glance it sounds great that 1,200 students will be receiving $1,000 scholarships, if we stop and think about it for a moment, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. What is $1,000 after all, when a person is talking about college tuition? Giving away 1,200 scholarships is a nice enough idea, but it misses the mark in the real world where the cost of education greatly outweighs what a one thousand dollar scholarship can provide.
At my town’s local community college alone, a single class is around three hundred dollars. A one thousand dollar scholarship couldn’t even get a student a full semester of classes. And this is just a local community college. Fast forward to a bigger university and the cost goes way up, and if room and board are an issue, that’s an even further cost. If a person is dropping twenty thousand dollars on an education (twenty thousand dollars being on the lower end of the spectrum), what is a one thousand dollar scholarship in the whole great scheme things? Almost nothing, a mere drop in the bucket. How many students receiving those thousand dollar scholarships will still find themselves unable to finish paying for college, or end up with debt for the better part of their lives?
Perhaps a better solution would be to give to fewer students, but to give those students more money, enough to ensure they actually got to finish pursuing their education. If the $1.2 million that best buy plans to give away were divided among 100 students instead of 1,000, each student would get a $12,000 scholarship. That’s eleven thousand dollars more per student, an amount that someone could actually pay something with.