Scholarships have become more valuable as tuition increases have outpaced the inflation rate for four decades, saddling student borrowers with $1 trillion in education loans. President Barack Obama and Congress are pressing colleges to control costs and ease the financial burden on students and their families.

Job Disadvantage

To require students to net several thousand dollars in a summer job adds to their financial strain, said Harley Frankel, executive director of College Match, a nonprofit group in Los Angeles that helps low-income students get into top colleges.

“A lot of times, low-income kids can’t get summer jobs, especially in this economy,” which forces them to borrow, said Frankel, who had run the national Head Start program. The savings requirement also prevents most students from taking unpaid summer internships, which puts them at a disadvantage later in the job market, he said.

Established in 1999 with an initial $1 billion from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gates Millenium Scholars program bestows 5,000 awards annually to low-income, minority students. It gave $86 million in the current academic year, and the average annual award was $11,593 in the decade through 2010.

Fee Waived

“Students end up with loan debt that is unnecessary because the institutions are forcing them to take out loans they should not have to,” said Larry Griffith, vice president at the United Negro College Fund, which administers the Gates program.

Griffith flew to Boston to argue on Brindis’s behalf, though he was unable to reverse the school’s decision about the summer expectation for his first two years. Boston College agreed to waive Brindis’s contribution this year because he had an unpaid internship last summer with the Education Department that fit in with the school’s service mission.

“For low-income students, the amount of money can sometimes be as much as 10 to 15 percent of the family’s annual income,” Griffith said, referring to the student contribution.

Brindis said he has received almost $96,000 in grants from Boston College that cover his first three years there.