Give postgraduate scholarships to those who need them most

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" I would meet the criteria, only to be rejected with no explanation of how exactly I fell short." It is not necessarily that you fell short, just sometimes there are several candidates who are all qualified and only one is chosen. Telling the others how they fell short can then be rather arbitrary.

Wholeheartedly agree that distributing money by group membership like ethnicity or gender is unfair. Scholarships should be distributed by one criterion, and that is academic merit. If somebody from an underprivileged group (which says little about how underprivileged that particular individual is) does not outperform applicants from another group, they simply don't deserve it, and it crowds out real talent. Science cannot afford to lose the best minds. Distribution by merit is the only way to improve science. If somebody with a working class background outperforms an aristocrat, they deserve the scholarship. If not, they don't. Because if you then give the scholarship to the less deserving candidate, the sense of unfairness will make the better scholar leave this profession. I am saying that as somebody who was a first-generation student myself.