A lot of those scholarships are locked along racial and gender lines. Immutable traits that, as a society, we have decided, as a foundational principle, are an unfair, unjust, unkind, and uncivil basis to discriminate upon. Equal representation is great. What's not great is producing a system that's so financially unsustainable for working class people that they're told to go solve what is framed as a merit-based challenge in exchange for money, but the qualification criteria for some crazy high percentage (something like 2/3rds, if my memory serves correct) of the challenges exclude certain cohorts of people based on demographic traits they have no control over, including race and gender. It's just a very unbecoming look for a progressive institution, it feels like we're deliberately trying to relive the racial and gender conflict of the last century by continuing to deliberately view all human interaction through the lense of race and gender, and framing race and gender filters as "merit" filters, almost as if to suggest that you can be a fundamentally flawed person by having the wrong chromosomes or ethnicity, rather than by viewing human interaction through the lense of interacting with actual individual people, who all have incredibly rich, deep, unique lived experiences that are not defined exclusively by demographic traits.

I believe it's this point of view that leads to the common perception of higher education among the actual working class - that the American college experience was once something great, but got so watered down in pursuit of ideals other than education that it has essentially turned into a big summer camp for the adolscent offspring of the rich to extend the "party" of youth for a little bit longer, hopefully increasing their social credit score in the process, with actual learning being a "nice to have" along the way.