Increasing Scholarship Money For Poor Students By Changing Ranking Metrics

Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Walter Kimbrough laments the fact that wealthy philanthropists often prefer to make large financial gifts to prestigious private schools that cater to wealthy students, rather than to schools that serve students with less financial means. This, he argues, does little to improve access to higher education, and in fact exacerbates  economic inequality. He also notes that many public universities are becoming less accessible to poorer students who nevertheless help support them with tax revenue. According to this report:

Between 1995 and 2003, flagship and other research-extensive public universities actually decreased grant aid by 13 percent for students from families with an annual income of $20,000 or less, while they increased aid to students from families who make more than $100,000 by 406 percent. In 2003, these institutions spent a combined $257 million to subsidize the tuition of students from families with annual incomes over $100,000 – a staggering increase from the $50 million they spent in 1995. At the same time, poor students were disproportionately bearing the brunt of increased college tuition and fees.

Information about the economic diversity of a number of educational institutions is available here. Some of the differences are surprising. At Columbia University in 2004-05, 62% of the student body didn't even apply for Federal financial aid. At Cornell University, another Ivy League institution located in New York that begins with the letter "C' that number is much lower, at 38%. 

I don't know if similar information is publicly available about law schools (Brian Leiter didn't seem to think so in April 2006) though I am sure most law schools track this sort of data for their own students. For law schools, the desire to do well in the U.S. News rankings puts pressure on administrators to allocate scholarship money in the direction of students exhibiting U.S. News rewarded "merit," rather than based on financial need.  This means that at some law schools, wealthy students receive copious scholarship money, and poor students receive little, especially if they attended less prestigious (but more affordable) undergraduate institutions.

This dynamic could be reversed in a microsecond if U.S. News began either making the economic diversity of a law school's student body a substantial ranking factor, or simply by rewarding law schools that provide need based scholarships.  Because the wealthy law schools can afford a lot more scholarships and economic diversity than the poor ones can,  the rich schools will remain securely on top of the rankings, while poorer students would graduate with less debt.