Just how many students are being advantaged by that rather paltry amount of money?
The problem is that under the current system, already polarised between the wafer-thin few and the frantic, competing many, where the standard of exams in the private sector is at least two years more advanced than the equivalent level in the state, children already excessively advantaged are being further preferred.
Today more of these less advantaged students are being funneled into college, even though many colleges are still unprepared to get them up to speed.
We have shown that despite the higher levels of breast cancer incidence among more advantaged women (Danø et al, 2003), relatively more women with less advantaged socioeconomic position are being diagnosed with a high-risk breast cancer and as a consequence are more likely to have to go through more extensive treatment and probably suffer a worse prognosis.
As well as targeting disadvantaged white boys, who are five times less likely to go to university than those from the most advantaged backgrounds, universities are being asked to reduce high drop-out rates among black students, who are 50% more likely to quit their studies than their peers.
"It's not just that they were advantaged before," Dr. Frech said.
I agree with them that organisationally charities shouldn't be advantaged, but it's because we're helping with really traumatised kids," she said.
If Iran and Hezbollah are advantaged... there is a much greater likelihood that at some point down the road... Hezbollah will have access to these weapons of mass destruction, and Israel will certainly be less secure.
"We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren't getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more," Mr. Obama said last week in a question-and-answer session at a convention of minority journalists in Chicago.
And, as Barr reminds us, financially privileged writers who can afford time to write and to think have always been advantaged, and they still are.
