As I said yesterday, need-based student aid in Canada is being eroded. We’re less likely than we used to be to spend education dollars on poorer students, and more likely to dish it out to kids from the middle-class (or higher).

A couple of student groups – notably OUSA have valiantly tried to push back a bit. But when push comes to shove, they have a hard time opposing tax credits because their members all benefit. There is one group, though, which you can count on to be 100% pro-need-based student aid, and that’s the Canadian Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (CASFAA) and its various provincial counterparts. Almost to a person (usually a woman, actually, but this is a gender-neutral blog) they think of themselves as advocates for students most in need of support. They’re on the front lines of the fight for improved access; no one sees the situation on the ground more clearly than them.

But I worry a little bit about the future of student aid offices at Canadian institutions. After all they have a dual history. Part of their function – the one I like most – originates in student services, where institutions decided to help student work through the bureaucratic rigamarole of student aid programs. But they also have roots in the admissions office, where handing out scholarships has long been a (minor) part of the enrolment management process.

At most institutions, those functions merged some time ago to create a single student aid office. But there are some tensions between those two roles that need to be acknowledged. One is unambiguously about increasing access. But the other, ultimately, is about maximizing institutional income. It’s not difficult to see how the two roles could potentially come into conflict.

Institutional income is growing more market-dependent. Governments are broke because of the financial crisis, and the rising costs of an aging society are going to make additional public funding harder to come by. That means institutions are in future likely to become ever-more reliant on private funding – particularly tuition. In the U.S., this exact problem has led to an increasing use of tuition discounting as a means of attracting students – in effect, using grants less as a way of improving student access than as a tool to maximize institutional revenue.

The worry is simply that over time, student-aid professionals come to see their access-enhancing role as less important than their revenue-maximizing one. I hope I am wrong, because student aid’s in enough trouble in Canada; seeing the resolve of its most important defender weakened would open the door to even more vote-pandering policy-hackery than we already have. That would be a crying shame.