Craig Fisher's parents planned ahead.
The 18-year-old aerospace engineering freshman is about to complete his first semester at UF, and thanks to two merit-based scholarships and money set aside by his parents, he shouldn't have to take out any loans to fund his undergraduate degree.
Fisher doesn't qualify for need-based financial aid programs like Federal Pell Grants or Florida Opportunity Scholarships. But if his parents hadn't started saving early, he said, he would likely graduate in debt.
He's not alone. Of the 50,844 students enrolled at UF in the 2009-2010 school year, 9,573 received Pell Grants and 1,358 received Florida Opportunity Scholarships. Though about 70 percent of UF students receive a scholarship of some kind, the vast majority of these are non-need-based.
According to recent numbers released by College Board, U.S. colleges are giving out about $5.3 billion this year to students whose families don't qualify for financial aid.
Critics, including College Board analyst Sandy Baum, say this indicates colleges are giving money to students who don't need it. And as tuition continues to rise and grants and scholarship programs to fall, that $5.3 billion is becoming a point of controversy.
Instead of being need-based, this money is merit-based and is typically awarded to students based on academic or extracurricular achievements in high school.
At UF, these merit scholarship programs include Bright Futures, National Merit and Lombardi scholarships.
For the 2009-2010 school year, 26,712 UF students qualified for Bright Futures scholarships, receiving a total of $77,250,681 in aid.
The National Merit scholarship program awarded $1,811,646 to 797 students, and there were nine Lombardi scholars who received $8,177 in aid for the year.
Rebecca Johnson, assistant director of admissions at UF and the merit-based scholarship coordinator, said in an email that these types of scholarship programs can have a variety of uses.
Some schools implement them to recognize top academic students, she said, while others use them as recruiting mechanisms to attract the best and the brightest.
Highly selective universities like Harvard and Yale, for example, give grants to families with incomes as high as $200,000 a year, the College Board report indicated.
Many students who qualify for merit-based scholarships like Bright Futures or National Merit may also qualify for need-based aid, Johnson said. This makes it almost impossible to determine how many UF students are receiving merit-based aid who would not otherwise qualify for assistance.
Michelle Novoa, a 19-year-old biology freshman, said she thinks merit should play a larger role in financial aid.
"There are a lot of people on the borderline," she said. "People who don't qualify for need-based aid but can't really afford to pay for college themselves."
Fisher suggested merit-based scholarship programs institute an income cap so students who come from wealthy families would not qualify but middle-class students would.
"But if a person is bright, they shouldn't be punished by losing out on scholarship opportunities," he said, "College is expensive for everyone."
