Free School Lunches

Most students that attend college do so to increase their human capital and receive a meaningful return on their college investment. Because college is an investment for many students, the decision to attend college is constrained by price and some students do not attend or complete college because they find the price of college to be too high. In the United States, in recent years, a few states have began offering broad-based merit scholarship programs to help students reduce the cost of attending college, making them more likely to attend college. These programs reward students for their high school academic achievements and typically require a minimum GPA and/or college entrance exam score. The programs were created with the primary goals …show more content…
A study that compares the academic success of students who received free school lunches because of financial need to students that didn’t receive these free lunches because they were able to afford their own lunch showed that students that did not receive these free lunches, on average, did better in school than students that were part of the free lunch program (students from a lower socioeconomic …show more content…
The results from these studies show that students that do the best in school are White or Asian American and from a higher socioeconomic class, which often times go hand in hand. Because the broad-based merit aid programs only consider merit, White or Asian American middle class students are getting the best grades in school and are awarded the broad based merit aid programs more often than African Americans or Hispanic Americans. These White and Asian middle class Americans, however, were likely to attend college and their enrollment decision is not greatly effected by these programs, rendering the program insignificantly effective for it’s primary recipients. Tables 2 and 3 below show that Whites and Asians represent larger percentages of award recipients than their percentage of their graduating classes in Florida and Michigan State. The opposite holds true for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans, who are less likely to have the financial resources to attend college and more likely to need the aid from the broad based merit aid program. This shows, that the benefactors of these programs, White and Asian Americans are not usually further incentivized to enroll in college because they either would have enrolled anyway or their decision, given that most financial aid does not effect the decisions of