I love hear stories like this! After reading your blog, the first thing I did was run a few calculators. Thumb your nose at the achievements and the financial package if you want, but it was a transformative event for my family and I’m proud and thankful for both of my son’s good fortune because of it. If only this mom had considered having her daughter apply there! Find the best school you can afford and save your money for grad school…. You can read her reaction in the following post: An Angry Mom Rails Against Elite Colleges. All of this has become merit vs need debate, there will be winner and losers. These and other universities may also have some scholarships for valedictorians and other highly qualified scholars. My son had an idea of which college he preferred and he listed that one first; you do have an opportunity to change your mind and change the first place listing. We have a range from Yale to state schools to small liberal arts colleges of varying degrees of eliteness. Arizona (2015): 65 total, 57 with university sponsorship; (2016): 43 total, 37 with university sponsorship. Your daughter should look into the University of Alabama. Try not to take it personally. It does not matter one iota where you go to college. We will list the university, followed by the total number of merit scholars in the 2015 report, followed again by the number of those scholars that also received school support based on the merit scholarship. Choosing an Honors Program–20 Questions to Ask, College Value: Public Honors vs. University of Louisville gives this generous scholarship to National Merit Finalists. I’ve heard essentially the same thing from admission officers at a few Ivies. Both parents, who are physicians, were shocked that their daughter, who is a National Merit Finalist, didn’t receive any merit scholarships from the elite schools where she applied. Actually, I believe that the vast majority of parents aren’t aware of this phenomenon. Nor were any of the 176 at Stanford or 166 at Yale. I appreciated it so much I had my second son take the assessment as a sophomore so he could see where he is, work on areas he can improve on and achieve his scholarship qualifying score this year. it will come down to fit and cost as we aren’t in a position to pay in full, and I won’t have him come out of undergrad with unmanageable debt. He was accepted into one and waitlisted at another. MIT offered somewhat less, so that we or our son would have perhaps needed manageable loans for him to attend there. That’s when we re-directed to Rennselaer for engineering, because their final EFC for us was 30,000, plus they gave our son academic merit awards that will cut his overall cost to attend in half. Colleges That Change Lives, Duke University, National Merit Scholar, slider, Univiersity of Chicago, Washington University St. Louis. What is sad about the trend toward not giving merit scholarship funding is that it’s another place where middle-class families get nothing. Let alone foolishly paying full price to go. Follow Lynn on other social media platforms or subscribe to The College Solution RSS Feed below. My daughter is a dancer so we had very specific things she wanted and on top of all the academic criteria, there were auditions too. The trade off is obvious. He was a National Merit Finalist and hoped for MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science as his first choices. Becoming a National Merit Scholar isn’t going to get you a free ride to Harvard or Stanford. On any given day your student’s application will be in a pile with 100 (or 1,000) similar students and it is not clear how one is better than another. A longer list of public universities appears below. The excellent private universities still awarding merit aid are willing to take the heat for sponsoring non- need-based students based on merit alone at a time when the inequities of scholarship funding have led to a greater emphasis on allocating funds mostly or entirely on a need-based scale. If you’d like some more resources for finding colleges you might not have considered, here’s another great place to look: http://diycollegerankings.com/college-search-resources-2/. The 3 free rides are not our top choices so that’s really tough when you know the schools that fit much better cost $! If your son is several points above the prior years’ scores and has equivalent SAT scores and good GPA and school performance (the Natl Merit Corp follows up with the school and your family), it is very likely he will make it. A student from a less populous state will also get preference with all things being equal. This might be the case where a family is quite well off, but didn’t save for college. There are lots of fine institutions where bright and hard-working students can learn and find success. These are one-time awards. On a whim, they called a university where he had not applied. I believe that their situation is very common. Mississippi St (2015): 37 total, 33 with university sponsorship; (2016): 37 total, 29 with university sponsorship. My own child did decently on the PSAT, but not nearly high enough for NMS status, but yet rec’d an almost perfect score on the SAT. Colleges with a year over year increase in sponsored scholarships are in bold. Of course we encouraged him to apply to schools that offer full scholarship but are happy with his choice. No School accepted My daughter! The info may have changed, but it is a good starting place. A word on being accepted to elite schools and having a child that is a National Merit Scholar etc. By diversity I mean zip code, athletes of rare sports, cello players, etc. merit scholarships to finalists, but is there a way to find out which ones truly grant full ride tuition? One place to look would be some of the schools in the Colleges That Change Lives book. Another factor to consider (having worked in a college scholarship office) is that a certain percentage of scholarships are designed to attract specific candidates to allow the college to show diversity. We did save and plan for such a college but it really seems disingenuous when the aid package that “meets” need includes substantial loans and the non-direct costs such as books and travel are low-balled. If I had worked full-time and sent the kids to public school, there’s no question that we’d have saved enough to pay full tuition for our son anywhere he could get in.). As a general rule, the higher the number of school-supported merit scholars, the greater the recruitment is for merit scholars. Of the 23 public universities listed, only 8 have increased their sponsorship of national merit scholars year over year. I feel badly for angry mom. Also there are a few that offer full rides to National Merit Semi-finalists. • New College of Florida, After some thought some things are clear: 1) Schools are businesses and would not survive if they admitted only the most qualified students. The University of Wisconsin only sponsored 5 merit scholars in 2016, out of 17 enrolled at the university. The professor seemed quite dismayed and was very apologetic. Let the rich morons worry about bribing their way in. Duke’s average merit scholarships are amazingly high at $54,947, but keep in mind that only 3.5% of frosh receive one. I guess we’ve all had friends, students, parents, etc.tell us about the kid they know who received a full merit scholarship to (fill in name of highly prestigious school here). Today I am sharing a guest post about the National Merit Scholarships by Michelle Kretzschmar, who is the creator of the DIY College Rankings Spreadsheet which contains information on over 1,500 colleges that families can use to identify schools best for them. The problem here is selection bias. It’s not too late to register and I’m still giving out the 25% discount. It all seemed like a big unfair game that I didn’t want to even play. Good catch Bruce! If you happen to be the only left handed accounting major from Trumbell County, we might have a scholarship for you. They will still have “smart kids” attending. That said, 99% of schools would love to have your daughter as a student. Many schools that offered full or significant rides 5-6 years ago have stopped or reduced the number of scholarships, but several still do the program. Clemson (2015): 55 total, 41 with university sponsorship; (2016): 43 total, 36 with university sponsorship. Ole Miss (2015): 40 total, 34 with university sponsorship; (2016): 43 total, 30 with university sponsorship. The University of Michigan has an even (slightly) better offer, given that tuition there is a little lower. Yes, Harvard ranked fourth in the number of National Merit Scholars attending in 2015 but none of them were doing so on a Harvard sponsored National Merit Scholarship. My oldest son is a National Merit Finalist. We’ll cross that bridge should we need to. IE kid A gets very good or full ride offers from several schools while kid B gets little to none from the same schools. If he commits there this month, he can save most of his funds for graduate school. I’d urge you to spend some time reading the ton of comments that you can find at the bottom of the Angry Mom post! You can learn how by attending my popular online course, The College Cost Lab. The University of Tulsa does not give free tuition or a full ride for being a National Merit! If not, which Wesleyan? Duke University, for example, recently gave 60 merit scholarships in a freshman class of 1,730. The other two, not a cent. Last week my daughter took a bus up to Boston to visit Tufts. One school even flew him up to New England for a two day tour and interview. If you look at their 2013 common dataset: http://finance.caltech.edu/documents/178-cds2013_final.pdf. These schools usually won’t advertise this, but there are definitely openings at private schools and also state universities.