@lucy78 – Welcome to the conversation! @vistajay has it exactly right. You have inadvertently tapped into one of the great unresolved issues from the last admission cycle, which was the first to include OOS Benacquisto scholarships.
For the sake of completeness, there is a widespread misconception that the Benacquisto is a full ride at all of the participating Florida schools. This is true at the PUBLIC schools, but the legislature limits its value at UM to the highest published COA at the 5 participating PUBLIC schools. As @vistajay correctly stated, it was around $22-23K last year, and will adjust this year to whatever the highest public number ends up being. As you can see, better than a sharp stick in the eye, but far from a full ride at a school with a $70K COA. Also, I am sure that everyone’s assumption here is that folks chasing National Merit scholarships do not have significant financial need. This is important since, while the Benacquisto at UM will stack with any MERIT scholarships you are lucky enough to receive, I am 99.9% sure it will not stack with need based aid (which also usually includes scholarships), since it won’t change your family’s EFC as calculated by the school. In other words, it will reduce dollar for dollar need based aid you would receive at a private school like UM, and will only reduce your total out of pocket costs if your need based aid is less than the amount of the Benacquisto.
As far as your other question goes, as I said above, we had a spirited debate last year with no resolution. As @vistajay said, schools like FSU and UCF that were aggressively recruiting OOS NMFs before Benacquisto was extended to OOS have made a commitment to fully fund the scholarships if anything bad happens with Benacquisto in the future. Schools that made no such effort to recruit NMFs before have not made such a commitment, nor is it reasonable to expect them to do so. This is a state program, and schools like UF are happy to take the state’s money and have NMFs attend. But schools like UF and UM made a decision long ago to not use their resources to fund large scholarships for NMFs, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to feel forced to do so if the state wavers in its commitment, as it is likely to do at some point (although hopefully not so soon after passing the legislation!).
Based on the research I did last year, I think the legislature is vastly underestimating how popular the program is going to be, and is going to be shocked when it gets the bill for the Class of 2023. In fact, I think UF is going to be the #1 destination in the country for NMFs, taking the place held by OU for the past few years (prior to the major decline in OU’s NMF population this year after the reductions made to its program upon the retirement of its former president, who was a big proponent of their program). The question is, how will the legislature respond? They can either fully fund the program going forward (which will be expensive, and will have always limited support since the benefits are going to OOS students who do not have financial need in order to raise the profiles of the schools, and arguably at the expense of in-state students with less stellar statistics but greater financial need – this is why no other state has a similar program!), reduce the funding, or kill it entirely for OOS.
The problem you have is that it is impossible to predict the outcome with certainty before we have even gone through one admissions cycle. This legislation was enacted so late in the game last year that very few people knew about it and were in a position to take advantage of it, so nobody knows what the costs are going to look like or how committed the legislature is going to be to funding it until next summer/fall, after they see the bill for next year. The budgetary process is a political one, merit scholarships are discretionary spending, and an OOS student on a full ride is not a constituent anyone is going to care about when cuts have to be made. On the other hand, grandfathering in current students would certainly be the right thing to do if there would be any changes going forward, and would be the outcome schools like UF would undoubtedly lobby the legislature for if the situation arose. Again, no guarantees, but, for what it’s worth, I think Florida has cut back educational benefits without grandfathering for its own residents in the past when there were funding shortfalls, but I’m not an expert on that. Perhaps a Florida resident knows for sure???