The Miss America pageant has often rebutted critics who say that the entire process objectifies women by pointing out that they are “the world’s largest provider of scholarships for women.” That’s a point that’s difficult for anyone to find fault with, even those who may take issue with the selection criteria.
The pageant claims to “provide” $45 million in scholarships annually, a staggering amount.
Considering the average cost of in-state tuition and fees at a public university for the 2013–2014 school year was $8,893, the Miss America Foundation could theoretically send 5,060 deserving women to college every single year.
But that doesn’t seem possible, does it? Apparently no one has ever really thought about it, because it has taken a late night talk show host to do the research to find out if it’s actually true.
John Oliver, the host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, said that his curiosity got the best of him when he noticed the Miss America pageant throwing around the scholarship claims on television.
“Miss America does not just say it’s the biggest scholarship organization, it backs this up with numbers,” Oliver said. “$45 million — that is an unbelievable amount of money, as in I literally didn’t believe that.
“We went to their website and, to be honest, it wasn’t a great sign that it said ‘We Fun Scholars,’” he continued, pointing out that the “d” in “fund” had obviously been left off. “But it was then, while digging around on their site that we discovered that Miss America and its foundation are registered non-profits, which means they have to file public tax forms. So what we were looking for was that crazy number, $45 million. What we found instead was that in 2012, at the national level, they spent less than $500,000 in cash scholarships, leaving us a mere $44.5 million short of what they say they provide. And at this point, we really had a clear choice, we could have just thought, sure, the numbers don’t really add up… Or, we could try to pull the tax forms from every state-level competition in the country, because this was starting to drive us insane.”
And that’s exactly what they did. Oliver’s staff got the 990 forms for 33 states and said that they “tried to contact everyone else,” but found that, even making the most generous assumptions, the highest number they could get to was less than $4 million, over $40 million short of the amount the organization claims to be dolling out on a yearly basis.
As it turns out, when Miss America says they are “the world’s largest provider of scholarships for women,” the word “provider” is an important qualifier.
“Some schools offer scholarships directly to pageant contestants. And the trick is, Miss America counts all of them, not just the ones they can physically take,” Oliver explained.
And Miss Alabama served as the perfect example.
“Miss Alabama in its 2012 filing said it provided nearly $2.6 million in scholarships to just one school — Troy University… But when we contacted Troy, it turns out the pageant got to that $2.6 million by multiplying the value of a single scholarship by 48, the number of competitors who could theoretically accept it, even though the actual number of contestants who accepted a scholarship that year was — and you’re not going to believe this — zero, absolute zero.”
Oliver did note, however, that their research indicated that the Miss America Organization is indeed the largest scholarship granting organization exclusively devoted to women, in spite of the fact that the actual number of scholarships they give out is far less than they seem to want people to believe.
“John Oliver reaffirmed that the Miss America Organization (MAO) is the largest scholarship organization for women when he stated the number of scholarship dollars claimed ‘…is more than any other women-only scholarship we could find,’” MAO said in response to the criticism. “We highlight the impressive, generous $45 million in scholarships made available in an effort to honor every one of our academic partners nationwide who make available cash and in-kind financial opportunities to the MAO and young women who participate in the program… As with any scholarship, the full amount awarded may not always be used as recipients’ plans change or evolve.”
(h/t Vox)
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