Eighteen months ago I was much less full of praise than others for Graham Tuckwell’s $50 million scholarship donation to the ANU. I said:

Like many scholarship schemes, the Tuckwell scholarship will go to people who already have plenty of potential that is unlikely to go to waste. They will go to university anyway, find mentors anyway (one of the claimed benefits of the scheme), and make something of their lives. They are not the people who need help.

Instead, these scholarships are used for essentially wasteful positional competition between universities. The ANU will use the Tuckwell’s scholarships and the associated publicity to try to take top students away from Sydney, Melbourne and other universities that buy talented students .

The announcement today of the 2015 scholarship winners highlights my point. The schools represented from my home state of Victoria (below) hardly suggest that the scholarships are opening up opportunities for the under-privileged. Instead, they are the ANU poaching students from the University of Melbourne.

Melbourne Grammar School, Westbourne Grammar School, Geelong Grammar School, Melbourne High School, Geelong Grammar School, Ballarat Grammar School St Kevin’s College, Presbyterian Ladies’ College

As I said last year, there are much worse ways a rich man could spend his money. But there are also much better ways.

Update: A reader who likes empirical data has sent me the socioeconomic background data of the successful schools. Three of the students are from schools that have more than 25% of their students from low SES backgrounds. But that isn’t enough to change the overall picture of massive over-representation of the top quartile.