Thsi is simply a continuation of the problem I pointed out in "The Funding Gap" at Open Source Politics.

If there is any grand, elegant logic behind the federal government's dispersal of more than a billion dollars in college aid, then Maria Hernandez is humble enough to confess that it has escaped her.

Consider her point. Poverty is hardly a rarity among the students of California State University at Fresno, where she is the director of financial aid. Many come from families working in the fields nearby, on farms where students spend their summer and winter vacations harvesting peaches and sugar beets to stay in school.

About three hours and a world away sits Stanford. Far fewer of its students are poor, yet the federal government gives it about 7 times as much money to help each one of them through college under one program, 28 times as much in another and almost 100 times as much in a third, government data show.

"Pretty sad," if you ask Ms. Hernandez.

Similar discrepancies emerge across the nation, adhering to a somewhat counterintuitive underlying theme: The federal government typically gives the wealthiest private universities, which often serve the smallest percentage of low-income students, significantly more financial aid money than their struggling counterparts with much greater shares of poor students.