In 2012 Spain inaugurated a reform of its higher education financial aid system inspired by three principles: cost-sharing, increasing academic performance and school efficiency. This reform has shifted the aim of the system from equality of access to a type of meritocracy that can be defined as class-biased, as it is only applied to low-income students who require scholarships to fund their university education. After contextualizing this changing Spanish financial aid system, the life-experiences of grant-holders are discussed, based on in-depth interviews with scholarship recipients. Our analysis shows how the hardships and constraints that these low-income students endure during their university education have been toughened after the reform. The paper concludes that the reform increases and naturalizes the social inequalities that traditionally exist between youths of different social classes when planning, accessing and staying in university, as the critical sociology of education has shown recurrently.