Article about:- What Criteria Should Be Used in Awarding Scholarships for College?
Scholarships a word used for awarding the students or may be to support them financially. There should be a certain criterion for the same, generally the criterion is may be on the basis of caste or may be on the basis of the income. It has a lot of hidden purpose involved sometimes the purpose is incentivize the child for studying better; sometimes it is to emphasize the weaker section of the society by giving them monetary benefits. Sometimes scholarships are confused with grants, scholarships are for the educational purpose but the grants are for general, one can say that scholarship is a subset of grant.
The criterion for the scholarships is generally set by the government, educational institution, non-governmental organization, or any other kind of institution is following:
- Merit- based- on the basis of the marks or grades the scholarship is awarded to students scoring high grades or marks
- On the basis of the need of the student that is for the poorer class of people in order to support the student financially. The colleges can provide scholarships on the basis of the class not only on caste basis but on need basis.
- Specific to career imply giving monetary and non monetary assistance to the students for further studies or research. Colleges can give opportunity to students to study further by given them scholarships.
- College specific: Some colleges also give scholarship to students who score well in college and in the previous educational qualification. These scholarships are providing by the schools where a student get some relaxation in marks from colleges.
- Scholarships for extra - curricular activities: Many institutions give scholarships to students for performing well in certain non academic activity, sports, singing dancing, etc. This is done by the colleges or schools in order to represent their own teams in various competitions.
- And a lot more types of scholarships are there which are organization specific or used for some promotional purposes, to gather the crowd for a particular institute or competition or may be announced by a political party to increase the number of votes in the elections.
Specific to any educational institutions, colleges to be precise the criterion can be any of the above mentioned except based on a particular caste, sex colour or any other basis of discrimination. In fact these bases actually don't remove discrimination it instead give rise to it. So the criterion should be such that it enhances the capability actually and the efforts and the monetary help doesn't go into vain, it should be such that it incentivizes the child to do a certain activity religiously be it in sports or be it academically or be it any other possible activity.
The criterion of scholarships should set a target for everyone, should signal to others that it is beneficiary for them and others. Also get motivated rather than thinking that the person belongs to a certain religion or caste that's got the help because of the family background. If the scholarships are given on the basis of certain criterion so this might feel as a punishment for other person.
The following example is a must to quote here, the recent riots in India regarding a particular community should be a part of a certain specific caste, the people are involved in so much of destruction that instead of the benefits the country faced so much of loss in economic terms and a lot of social unrest, these riots were and in fact are only for being part of a community just because that community has certain reservations in government universities and colleges or may be for the grants that the caste is taking benefits from. These reservation and scholarships for being poor or may be for lower caste people is giving rise to more of discrimination.
So in the nutshell the criterion for any kind of scholarships must be on the basis of the talent , the child or a student possess rather than on the basis of different kinds of social demarcations . These social demarcations for the scholarships will only signal the worse part of the scholarships being given. Apart from academic and extra - curricular activities, the scholarship can also be on the basis of the economic condition of the child or may be on the basis of the talent the child possesses. Finally would like to conclude by saying that any grant, monetary benefits or may be a non - monetary benefit should be offered only for the betterment of the child or student and should contribute for the welfare of the society as a whole and should not create a chaotic situation in a country and neither a discriminatory one.