In what country? For example in the US today, scholarships are competitive (as any free money is), but the selection criteria has little to do with merit. Even

In what country? For example in the US today, scholarships are competitive (as any free money is), but the selection criteria has little to do with merit. Even top universities (MIT, Stanford, Harvard) specifically do not provide merit-based financial aid. There are some exceptions with private scholarships, but those are few. The majority of scholarships and grants are federal or federal+school, where the state puts a lot of specific requirements on the students, mostly based on need with some social mobility mixed in. The result is that students go through a rigmarole that has very little to do with proving merit for the chosen field to the grant-givers who are themselves far removed from teaching or research in that field. What I am talking about is a clear set of entrance exams given (or agreed to) by the university itself. No intermediaries, pure merit. This is very far from how the scholarships work in the US today.