Octavio Brindis thought he had it made when he won a scholarship funded by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates to help him go to college tuition-free.

The second of five children of Mexican immigrants, Brindis has a father who works in a wine company warehouse and makes less than $40,000 a year. His mother is unemployed. Yet, financial-aid officials at Boston College, where it costs about $60,000 to attend, told Brindis he needed to pay about $2,500 a year -- part of a mandated student contribution. Lacking the cash, he took out $5,000 in loans over two years, he said.

The aid officer “would tell me that I was contributing such a small percentage to what my education costs, but she didn’t understand that small percentage was a much bigger percentage to my family,” Brindis, 21, said.

Scholarship programs funded by some of the nation’s biggest donors including Gates, Coca-Cola Co. and Michael Dell, are taking aim at practices used by wealthy colleges, such as Boston College, which has a $1.65 billion dollar endowment, Amherst, with a $1.64 billion fund and Barnard, with $216.4 million. They say the schools hurt poor and minority students by rescinding aid once they find out they have awards from outside sources or by banning use of the funds to cover some student contributions. Donors complain that, in some cases, their gifts are boosting a school’s bottom line rather than the students they seek to help.

Boston College said its policy evens the playing field for financial-aid students, according to Bernie Pekala, director of student financial strategies at the private institution.

A ‘Conundrum’

Any student receiving financial aid from the college must still fork over what is known as the summer contribution, though students can earn the amount during the school year or borrow.

Letting students like Brindis use outside grants to cover the contribution “would be unfair to all the other ones who didn’t win the Gates,” Pekala said.

Similarly at Amherst College, a wealthy liberal arts school in Massachusetts, students can’t use outside scholarships to pay their “summer contribution,” which can run as high as $1,600, said Tom Parker, dean of admission and financial aid.

“Here’s the conundrum. You want to treat everybody as equally as you can,” Parker said. “Morally it’s a difficult question.”

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