Is it reasonable for students who use iPhones and wear designer clothes to be considered poor students receiving grants? How should the criteria be used to determine poor students?
Recently, a student at a university in Tianjin reported the unfair distribution mechanism of the school's bursary with his real name, and as an orphan and economically poor, he did not receive the bursary, but instead used the latest Apple mobile phone and wore AJ as a poor student to receive the bursary.
As soon as this news came out, it immediately sparked heated discussions on the whole network, and angry and questioning voices emerged one after another. Many people pointed the finger at "fake public and private interests" and "abuse of power", and felt that the classmate who had high consumption behavior and was rated as a poor student had an "unusual background". Some skeptical voices also start from this point, thinking that how can people with "background and money" look at these thousands of yuan?
The above paradox proves a problem, as far as the squeezing of bursaries is not so much a black-box operation, but rather a helplessness of the truly poor.
Choose between self-esteem and bread
In fact, as far as many people's personal experience is concerned, there are not a few poor students who wear brand-name clothes with Apple mobile phones during college. Why is the phenomenon of "poor people not poor" common? Because in the actual life of the university, except for a few extreme examples, it is really difficult to tell who is really poor.
This is also the reality has to admit the heart-wrenching, many really poor students are often relatively lacking in family education, some parents divorced, sick or died early, they have been struggling in the family atmosphere since childhood, it is easy to cause introverted inferiority character, and some will have a particularly strong self-esteem, for them, to be able to express the difficulties, it also takes great courage. In a place like a university, where there is no obvious level of consumption, it is indeed difficult to see the "difficulties" that are deliberately hidden.
And sometimes because of the limitations of personality and economic conditions, it will also make the "popularity" of really poor students not very good. In the case of a real-name report by a university student in Tianjin, we can also see that the whistleblower is in this situation, and he does not get along well with his classmates.
In contrast to this situation, many universities now adopt "democratic evaluation" in the evaluation of poor students, allowing other students who have not participated in the election to score the poor students who participate in the selection and assess the difficulty level. Regarding this selection mode, friends who have experienced it personally should know that the subjective emotions of people in this process almost dominate the entire trend, and the students with high activity in the class are easy to be "followed" by the class to score high, and the really poor students with bad popularity are not easy to evaluate.
What is true poverty? Ordinary students can't empathize
The main reason for this is that in the eyes of many ordinary students, this money can't reach their hands anyway, and it doesn't matter who they give it to, either they tend to be closer to their classmates, or they don't go against the big army, after all, in the hearts of many people, what substantive impact can only two or three thousand a year have on life?
This begs the question, what is true poverty? For most people, a subsidy of up to 4,000 yuan a year is the icing on the cake, which can be used to travel, buy designer shoes, and big-name cosmetics, but will not be unable to eat or continue their studies because they don't have this money.
The real poverty defined in mainland law is the annual per capita net income of less than 1,205 yuan, and the average daily expenditure is about 3 yuan. In modern society, this kind of income is absolutely not even guaranteed to have food and clothing. If you live in such a situation, get the latest Apple phone, and anyone will sell it for money without any hesitation to make ends meet.
Just like many people shout that they are poor all day long, but in fact, only their income cannot meet some material needs on top of their basic life, and they will not rack their brains to exchange their big-name cosmetics, mobile phones and computers for money.
This is the reason why people think that poor students should not have high-priced mobile phones and brand-name shoes. We need to be clear about the purpose of the bursary. The state has set up bursaries as an important source of funds for poor students to continue their education. If the bursary is not used properly, these poor students will lose the opportunity to continue their education and face great uncertainty about the future.
At this time, some people will definitely say, how can there be so many students waiting for the bursary to eat, and how many people can get it according to such harsh conditions? Therefore, this is also the original intention of many colleges and universities to adopt "scoring rankings", since they can't find absolute poverty, then look for relatively poor subsidies. But even if you take 10,000 steps back, this money should not be used for hobbies and vanity.
At the same time, even the approach of "poverty ranking" should be based on certain criteria. It is not called poverty because of the economic conditions that are slightly worse than others, according to this logic, compared to the people at the top of the Forbes rich list, 99% of the world's people are poor.
To put it simply, the obvious definition of what counts as a poor student and should receive a bursary is that the money should be used to ensure life, not to improve the quality of life.
Textbook-style answers from multiple colleges and universities
So how can schools tell who is really poor, and how should bursaries be distributed?
For this problem, the operation of Hunan University of Science and Technology is considered a textbook-level case. According to big data statistics, the school will issue meal subsidies to students who consume more times in the canteen and have a relatively low average consumption amount, and will not publish the list after the candidates are determined, and directly send money to the meal card. To a large extent, this maintains the self-esteem of poor students, and the criteria for judging the recipients of assistance are completely objective.
In fact, this is not an isolated case, many colleges and universities in China have adopted this subsidy method of "targeted poverty alleviation", taking Nanjing University of Science and Technology as an example, more than 60 meals in the canteen every month, and the cost of no more than 420 yuan will receive the school's meal subsidy. However, in addition to being moved, there are also many people who are worried about whether such an operation will take advantage of loopholes, after all, such conditions are still very easy to achieve, such as buying only one dish per meal, and buying the rest with other people's meal cards, or buying two bottles of Coke in the canteen every day, or eating out as usual.
Thinking about it this way, it seems that there are indeed big loopholes, wouldn't it be a lot of money for someone to test it?
But in fact, two issues are overlooked. Generally speaking, the meal data of thousands of poor students over the years will be comprehensively counted to form screening criteria. Of course, as mentioned above, it is not impossible to deceive artificial intelligence by data fraud, so after the system screens out the list of poor students, it will call the data of poor households to compare it with it. After that, the electronic list is sent to each college, which is then manually reviewed, and the database of poor students is adjusted according to the new list.
Of course, this is only a generic model, and different schools may adapt the model differently. For example, combining a work-study system with it requires a minimum of 40 hours of work per month to receive a grant. So in order to qualify for this grant, you need to complete the following conditions: trick the mentor into entering the database of poor students, realistically consume 60 "poor meals" per month, cheat the AI, and maintain a work-study job of more than 40 hours a month. In addition to this, it is necessary to fool through multiple review processes such as the student union...
This is difficult to accomplish for people who want to be opportunistic. But for the really poor students, this is the pattern of their daily life, and there is not much pressure to complete the above conditions.
What's more, even if the pseudo-poor students grit their teeth and complete all these processes, the money will only be deposited in the meal card and cannot be discounted, and for those who want to meet other material needs, the subsidy will instantly become tasteless.
In any case, bursaries are an important support for poor students to receive education, and they are also a key guarantee to promote educational equity and social justice. Only by ensuring that the distribution of bursaries is fair and selfless can we provide more children with the opportunity to change their lives through education, so that they can show their personal value and social significance.