Starting this year, three new scholarships named Libertas, Justice, and Veritas will be implemented Korea University (KU). Instead of giving financial rewards to students with high Grade Point Averages (GPA), the new scholarship policy primarily focuses on providing more financial aid to those in need. The drastic change of the scholarship program, however, has sparked a debate among KU students and remains controversial. 


   
▲ Kim Donggyu (’14, Psychology)
Scholarship should not serve as an instrumental value. It should be used to alleviate psychological instability of lowincome students, rather than motivate KU students’ learning. I personally hope that this scholarship could expand and assist with living expenses of underprivileged students. Although these students may manage to provide tuition for themselves with the help of various scholarships, they still need to manage other problems, like paying for school textbooks and coping with housing expenses. Meanwhile, our university tuition fee can also impose a big burden for a majority of the middleclass students who are on the ambiguous borderline between two different classes. Therefore, scholarships for middle-class students need to be implemented as well as to supplement distributive equity. 

   
▲ Lee Joo Yeon (’15, Business Administration)
I agree with the intent of the new scholarship policies to increase support for the deprived. If so, the ratio of merit-based scholarships should have been diminished instead of simply abolishing the established system since it was the only fair criterion available for students. State scholarship’s calculation of income percentile is not a reliable measurement because it is based on parent’s income. Some students receive more financial aid than they deserve when their parents do not accurately report their income. As a result, a number of students are placed in an unfavorable position. Grade scholarship supplements the weakness this system holds by giving equal opportunity for students to acquire scholarship. 

   
▲ Kang Gi Hyun (’14, Biomedical Engineering)
As far as I am aware, the purpose behind the new scholarship policies is to offer support to the disadvantaged. However, I do not understand why this measure must lead to the abolishment of academic scholarships.  Like students in the lowincome group, countless middle-class students also study in difficult circumstances. Nonetheless, middle-class students do not benefit from any financial aid just because they deviate from the national student aid’s standard by a small margin. Thus, it is inconsiderate of KU to take away the faintest gleam of hope from these students. In my view, KU should come up with another alternative instead of insisting on an income redistribution policy.

   
▲ Lee Joo Myeong (’13, Food and Resource Economics)
How scholarships will be used at KU, either in the form of merit-based scholarship or need-based financial aid, is not a simple problem limited to KU. In fact, it is more complex and can be further extended to a social issue. For instance, people today constantly weigh between helping the lower classes of society through the law of differentiation and providing more incentives to skillful people based on the logic of a market economy. In my opinion, our society should head towards the former rather than the latter, because it is better in terms of both equality and efficiency. Currently Korea suffers from low growth, with its annual growth rate below three percent. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s 2015 report, however, Korea can expect a boost in its economic growth by raising the income of the bottom 20 percent of society. In this way, offering financial help to the deprived alleviates inequality in society, which then results in overall growth of an economy. Similarly, KU should also use its scholarships to help those in need. 
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