I'd be happy to! The original post says nothing about Hacker School's desire to "solve racism." Their goal is to increase the diversity of their applicant pool. Having previously instructed at a coding school which had a similar policy, I've fielded similar criticisms. In our case, we offered a 25% (if memory serves me) discount to female applicants. The goal was to spur more gender diversity in our applicant pool, and it worked swimmingly - our first class was a 50/50 gender split.

Despite our own perception of the success of the policy, we received plenty of complaints from both men and women. Ashe Dryden helpfully pointed out to me, when I had the opportunity to ask her opinion, that women on average earn 25% less than men, so really we had just made the program cost the same for women as it did for men.

If women or minorities are discouraged from applying to Hacker School because they would have a hard time paying their living expenses, these grants will help to eliminate that hurdle, thus achieving the goal of more applicant diversity. Needs-based grants wouldn't necessarily achieve that goal. Needs-based grants would also be more difficult from an administrative standpoint as applicants would have to prove their income, which would also invite a regulatory burden.