Why does financial aid prosper while the endowment starves?
A specter is haunting CMU. You can see it in the hazy air, smell it on the crusty Entropy sign, feel it on the shadeless Mall. It’s a modern-day tragedy. The poor are killing our endowment.
Andrew Carnegie laid down the endowment’s first million dollars himself. From the very start, it has been an institution by the financially able, for the financially able. For decades, we remained faithful to this sacred commandment. It was only recently that CMU stooped into the lowest of the low: admitting students who want the education of a private university, but can’t actually afford one.
Even worse, it’s not just CMU. Vanderbilt, MIT, Columbia, all once great institutions, now forever sullied by their wasteful support of the second class. Harvard and Yale remain the most committed in their support for legacy students, but even that seems to be slipping with their heinous ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ policies that only degrade the student body. Why include those only meant to be excluded?
At the same time, we give out so many needless handouts. Why would we reject a perfectly capable full tuition student, choosing instead to give $200,000 to some Dietrich nobody who’s only going to whine about “making the world a better place?” Public “universities” exist for a reason, you know. At the end of the day, the poor have nothing to give. And we cannot take what they do not have.
It’s just a load of nasty socialism. At this point, it’s more than clear that the economically-illiterate “financial aid officers” in Warner Hall have no idea that handouts like these have no benefit. They only take away from the people who deserve to be here.
CMU, it’s high time to make clear to the world your goal of becoming the best university in the nation. Do not conceal your views and aims—you may only attain these aims by a radical overthrow of all existing systems. You have nothing to lose but the worthless, and you have a world to win! Throw off your chains of financial aid—may the privileged of the world unite!