Need-Based Scholarships

In a capitalist society where the greatest effort supposedly results in the greatest reward, the excessive provision of need-based scholarships for higher education contradicts the very notions upon which this country was founded.

Students who work to excel in scholastic endeavors reap mediocre benefits from the majority of college and university systems, while underprivileged students whose parents either have not the means or have failed to prepare the means to supply financial aid receive the cream of the crop of government aid.

With the same intent as affirmative action programs, which aim to provide opportunity where none existed, such inappropriate dispensing of funds deprives the excellent for the matriculation of the less fortunate.

While none should suffer the loss of education and success only as a result of his or her financial situation, at the same time no determined, hard-working and talented individual should sacrifice his or her education for the sake of a less fortunate, and at times less gifted, student.

Merit-based scholarships, distributed on the basis of scholastic achievement alone provide the best means to distribute educational opportunities to those most worthy of them.

AUDRA CROSLEY, Thousand Oaks