Scholarships and Equity

This is the first of three posts on scholarships and equity. I wrote this over two years ago when I was elected as a College of Science Representative on ANUSA but didn’t dare to publish it – many of my friends are on significant scholarships. But I think the scholarship system is stacked against those who didn’t have the opportunities we did.

ANU has the lowest proportion of low-SES students out of any university in Australia.

This isn’t something that happened by accident. It’s because we categorically fail to provide equal access to education. How did this happen, and what can we do?

Currently, ANU has scholarships based solely on ATAR and academic results. These scholarships are deeply flawed because someone’s ability to be meritorious is profoundly influenced by their background.

There are people who work really really hard, but who didn’t have the opportunities we had. Maybe they went to a rural school and didn’t have a debating program, maybe they never heard of the Australian Science Olympiad, maybe they were working after class at KFC instead of revising for their exams. Maybe their parents were too busy working to read to them as a child, or couldn’t afford years of violin or piano lessons when they wanted to learn music, or the tutoring they needed when they struggled at school.

Assessing students from such wildly different circumstances with a single number is incredibly unfair. For some students, getting an ATAR of 92 is equivalent to someone else getting a 99.70. Evaluating people with this yardstick not only fails to support those in need, but indirectly selects for privilege. If you want to help people, these scholarships are literally worse than giving students money at random and hoping they need it. It’s pretty crazy when you think about it.

(For full disclosure, I used to have such a scholarship. I consider myself the beneficiary of an unjust system, and I’m trying to fix it.)

Even for scholarships that try to account for contextual factors, such as the Tuckwell scholarship, circumstance isn’t fully accounted for. It’s pretty hard to represent Australia in an olympiad if you had a combined year 9/10 maths class, to experiment with research if your nearest uni is 100kms away, or to win a sports championship if you have to travel for an hour every day to train. Of course, it’s pretty hard for anyone, but to many they are impossible. Yet, amongst a pool of exceptional candidates, it is precisely these exceptional achievements that end up being a deciding factor. This shows – public schools remain underrepresented, and Woroni analysis in 2024 showed scholars on average come from schools ranked in the top 10% for Socio-Educational advantage. Even if the program properly contextualises achievement, it still wouldn’t fully fulfill its potential to create opportunity – but at least it’ll faithfully select for merit.

Of course, not everyone on these scholarships is super privileged. Many are middle-class, or migrants, or from public schools, and everyone on a merit scholarship worked hard for it. But the system is stacked against those less fortunate, and that’s something we have to change. We can’t solve educational inequality, but we can do a lot more to help level an acutely uneven playing field for students coming to ANU.

How do we fix this?

Personally, I think the most politically achievable change is changing ANU’s ATAR-based scholarships to equity-based ones. But there’s a Tuckwell called Will who started a petition on reforming the Tuckwell scholarship, please sign if you’d support it: https://www.change.org/p/make-the-tuckwell-scholarship-fair