by Mark Drozdowski

I’m always eager to sink my reviewing teeth into a new book on higher education, yet somehow the prospect of digesting one on the history of financial aid didn’t initially thrill me. While important, financial aid doesn’t rank among the sexiest topics. But Rupert Wilkinson pulls it off with his new book, Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America. Though it’s not The Da Vinci Code, this volume nonetheless keeps the reader engaged and manages to teach us a few things about who receives aid, why they do, and who supports them.

The history of student aid, writes Wilkinson, a former professor of American studies and history at the University of Sussex, is a roller coaster, not a straight line. Wilkinson begins our ride in 1641, when Ann Radcliffe of London shelled out 100 pounds to Harvard College for the “yearly maintenance [of a] poor scholler.” Financial aid in America had begun. The author also tells us that student aid was well-established in England by the 13th century, and that all three types of aid—grants or fee reductions, loans and jobs—trace their roots to medieval times, when a student might have gained employment as a bell-ringer.

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