The "White Male Gap" in Scholarship Funding

Laura Lambeth recently posted on Twitter that her most recent blog post "opens up [a] can of worms." As a student affairs professional in Texas, she posted her thoughts on a new nonprofit organization started by college students in Texas aimed at providing scholarships for White males. In her post, she ruminated over how she understood why organizations and institutions provide minority-targeted scholarships, but could also understand the frustration of the students forming the association. In particular, she mentioned students with whom she has worked who experienced the same issues with accessing financial aid, particularly the lack of knowledge on how to navigate the complex array of funding (and not just FAFSA) opportunities around the nation.

I don't think she herself "opened a can of worms." I went to school with students who had the same complaint, and I know I must have worked with students who feel the same way, though none have specifically shared this concern with me. Rather, the group itself, the "Former Majority Association for Equality," is the entity that has opened the proverbial can of worms. According to the group's website, their mission is "to fill in the gap in the scholarships offered to prospective students." And it sounds like a laudable effort. The fact that a group of students has identified a need and is taking the entrepreneurial step of forming an organization to meet is commendable.

But does the need, as the group has described it, truly exist?

This is not the first time White college students (particularly politically conservative students) have claimed that there is a lack of opportunity for them to receive scholarships for their study. Where I am skeptical of this, and others', group's claim is on what data they concluded that there is a "gap" for White male students in access to scholarship money. Was it simply based on their own subjective qualitative experiences that they felt like there were no scholarships available to them? Are White male students really suffering lack of access to college as a group because no one will provide them scholarship funding?

Based on the methods I assume they used to collect their data, I can tell you from my experience as a White male this lack of scholarship opportunity does not exist. I received two generous scholarships from Gonzaga University to attend the college, one due to my academic merit as demonstrated by my college application and one for being an alumnus of a Catholic high school, and then a Byrd scholarship (I think) for academic merit as well. In fact, I had to turn down a scholarship from the State of Montana given to all high school valedictorians because I chose not to attend in state. From my standpoint, my data, apparently collected in the same manner, contradicts their data, and causes me to question how real this perceived "gap" truly is. In fact, I believe my privilege as a White male made me more likely to access this money than many of my peers who also attended Gonzaga (and I could expand this idea much further, but that would be a much longer post). Which is why I decided to do some informal research to see if there are numbers that truly demonstrated this apparent disparity in scholarship awarding in the United States.

As it were to happen, I stumbled onto one of the best writers on the topic of White privilege in the nation. Tim Wise actually wrote a post on his blog about the topic around four years ago, and cited a study that was conducted by the General Accounting Office in 1994 on minority-targeted scholarships. (I wasn't able to find a more recent study, but I would argue the data may have only shifted minimally, if at all, and likely toward less money in minority-targeted scholarships.) The study found that 4% of all scholarship money considers race as a factor at all, and that 0.25% is restricted to just people of color. That means 99.75% (or 96%, if we use a conservative measure) of scholarship money is open to these students for whom there are, according to FMAE, no scholarship opportunities at all. And chances are, if White males are able to compete for this money, privilege will play a major role, and they will more likely be the recipients of this money than their counterparts. As for the impact of scholarships that are restricted by race, only 3.5% of students of color in college receive money from these scholarships. The truth is that scholarships restricted by race are a very small proportion of all the money awarded annually to college students, and very few students of color actually reap the benefits of these awards.

I will let you read through Tim's post more for his analysis of White privilege with regard to college funding as it is extremely insightful. As for me, after finding out that my suspicions were confirmed, I got to thinking about what the real issues might be behind this group's concern over college funding. Typically, when White people claim affirmative action or any other attempt to correct institutional racism is "reverse racism," often it comes from a place of not being aware of one's advantages in society. Sometimes there are other systemic oppressions involved, though, and when Laura highlighted the story of the student who had trouble navigating the financial aid process, I began to wonder what other experiences this student may have had. Is this student the first in his family to attend college? First generation students face unique barriers from not having the same guidance and information as other students have when they apply to college. Is the student from a lower socioeconomic background? He may be facing greater financial need than many of his peers who have parents contributing more to their education, and it can feel like he cannot access enough aid to cover everything. It doesn't help though to claim that the reason for a lack of resources are students of color disproportionately receiving scholarships and that he is simply being denied aid for being White and male without having rigorous data to support this claim.

Now, if a group of private citizens decides they want to contribute toward a need or a cause that they have identified and they believe important, they are free to do so. I actually believe the reason many of these minority-targeted scholarships exist is due to the hard work of those who broke institutional barriers and decided it was important to contribute to their own communities to promote similar positive outcomes. I have been involved with the Pride Foundation in Seattle for a couple of years, a group that has been giving scholarships to LGBTQ-identified and allied individuals for approximately 25 years. The Foundation was started by LGBTQ-identified people and their allies who believed in funding people and initiatives that worked to end discrimination against the LGBTQ community and promoted positive outcomes within the community and society at large. If this Former Majority Association for Equality believes this is an important cause to support and fund, it is completely within their right, but usually initiatives like this die out in the long run because it is hard to sustain support for a need that is difficult to prove (especially if that proof lies solely in those who started the initiative).

Typically though, White anger comes from an unacknowledged fear of loss of privilege in society. I usually wonder if the passion for issues like this comes from an suppressed awareness that as privilege breaks down, people like these with FMAE are not as competitive for scholarship awards (or other benefits) as they once believed they were...