So all of my daughter’s college choices are national merit sponsors (they are listed on the NM website.) They all offer 1,000-2,000 per year, but that is forfeited if you are awarded the one time $2500 NM scholarship.
So obviously it would be in my daughter’s best interest to accept one of the school sponsored scholarships, but my question is this: If she is awarded the NM $2500 scholarship, can she decline it? If not, then what is the best way to avoid being awarded the $2500 scholarship? Right now she has listed undecided. Does that put her in or out of the running for the $2500 award? I have tried to read through past threads to get a definitive answer on this and it is so confusing!
Also, I thought I remember the UCF rep telling us that the $2500 can’t be received if accepting the full COA to UCF; their award ($500 NM) trumps the one-time award since they are basically giving you a full ride. I thought he said something about you only being able to receive one scholar award and the sponsoring college is the one to award that (if applicable). In any case, the college award would likely be reduced by the $2500 award if it’s a NM sponsoring college. Am I wrong?
I know you can only receive one official National Merit award. I assume you can decline the $2500 if you’ve received a better National Merit scholarship directly from a sponsor college.
The awards my daughter is looking at from various colleges are not official NMSC awards because these are not sponsor colleges. That is why she hopes to receive the $2500 direct from NMSC to go along with what the college will give her.
NMF’s can only receive at most one NM award - be it $2500 one timer, college-sponsored, or corporate-sponsored. Not sure whether you can turn down one award in order, hopefully, to receive another one.
Last year we assumed they gave these out to NMF’s who clearly didn’t have a college-sponsor by the time the awards were determined. The selection timing seems to coincide with SCEA/ED admissions and naturally those kids would list their #1 school right away in order to be considered for the one-time award. However, this theory has potential holes if you don’t need to list a school in order to be considered.
The rules for listing a college sponsor suggest that you can’t be offered any other NM scholarship, presumably including the $2500 award. They don’t say that you can be offered and decline. In fact, it says you will receive no more than ONE scholarship offer:
REPORT OF A SPONSOR COLLEGE AS FIRST CHOICE
Consideration for a college-sponsored Merit Scholarship award is limited to Semifi nalists who qualify as
Finalists and who also
report to NMSC that a sponsor college is their fi rst choice (see the list of college sponsors included in
the “Competition Instructions” section of the OSA and at nationalmerit.org/resources.php);
have applied for admission to the sponsor college; and
have not been offered any other National Merit Scholarship (corporate-sponsored, National, or another college-sponsored award). No student will receive more than one scholarship offer from NMSC. A college-sponsored Merit Scholarship award can be used only at the institution financing it and therefore is canceled if the winner changes college choice.
@Kayak24 NMFs can recieve both the COA scholarship and a NMSC/corporate $2500 award. For those who do not receive a NMSC/Corporate award, UCF will award them a $500/yr College Sponsored award, allowing every UCF NMF to become a NMS and receive the full ride scholarship. Not sure if that made sense… :-?
@Kayak24 Currently UCF is my Sons #1 choice. Can he potentially receive the COA and the $2500 award for a total of slightly more than the COA. It would help for the cost of the Towers.
@FSUdad93 , I’m uncertain about the rules. @sewin2music had a thorough visit to UCF as well and has different info. You may want to contact Luke VanBlaricom to be sure in case anything has changed. My D loved UCF and it was a top contender for her (before ED binding admission). Good luck to everyone!
@iahomeschoolmom - Just to clarify, those rules from NMSC don’t apply to any specific NMF-eligible merit awards from individual colleges (some of whom are college sponsors, some of whom, like the set your daughter is considering, are not). If I’m correctly reading your thread from a couple months ago, you were concerned that getting a $2500 award might shut out something like a full tuition or near-full tuition scholarship from a uni? Not well versed in that answer; however, my impression is generally: No. My understanding has been that an offer of the $2500 one -time National Merit scholarship will preclude receiving any-other NMSC-administered scholarship (either college-sponsored which runs $500 - $2,000 per year or a corporate scholarship). NMSC doesn’t worry about what an individual college might offer a student separately in order to attract him/her to the institution.
It’s kind of confusing because college sponsors might have TWO separate categories of merit aid for NMF’s. One is directly related to NMSC itself and is a “college-sponsored” award. The other would be university-specific awards in place to attract NMF’s (who are overwhelmingly in the honors program, tend to do very well academically, etc. All sorts of benefits to attracting NMF’s). Most kids chasing “NMF dollars” don’t worry about the NMSC-specific amounts since they are pretty small and only go to about half the NMF’s anyway. They are after the big bucks. The advice is, of course, to work with the individual schools on those.
In your daughter’s case, if I’m reading your posts correctly, her set of colleges all want to attract NMF kids but are NOT NMSC “college-sponsors.” Therefore, they likely don’t care about what your daughter puts down for her first choice since they don’t contribute to or participate directly in the NM program (ie they aren’t contributing to those $500 - $2,000 yearly “college sponsor” NMSC awards). They just care that she’s NMF. How that affects what your daughter specifies for her “first choice” has been a subject of debate on this thread - I strongly suspect that she should put down her genuine first choice as soon as she knows that that is. Whether that’s now or in March.
@FSUdad93 To my understanding yes and no… So UCF’s NMF COA scholarship is made of multiple scholarships. OOS students like me have the unofficial UCF National Merit Scholarship($18000) and the offical NMSC College Sponsor Award($250) for a total of $18250 per semester. For that second official NMSC College Sponsor scholarship, it totals to $2000 over the coarse of 4yrs. If your son were to recieve a NMSC $2500(not college sponsor but the other one), it would replace the offical NMSC College Sponsor Award and then you’d have about $500 more in the long run. I believe the $2500 scholarship is a one-time scholarship, however, which would definitely help with the expensive towers housing freshman year but would not be automatically spaced out like the college sponsor award. I’m really not sure if all that made sense. I’m terrible at explaining things and even worse at writing. :-/
** Definitely ask Luke for clarification/ an official answer!!
@JBStillFlying When I posted that other thread she still had a bigger list of colleges and many of them were sponsor schools who give out full-ride or full-tuition scholarships to NM Finalists. It makes sense that only $1000-2000 of that big scholarship is the part NMSC cares about and the rest is handled directly by the college, completely separate from NMSC.
At this point, she is keeping only one of those schools on her list (Oklahoma Christian University). We haven’t had a chance to visit yet, but she has spoken with a potential future professor on the phone and that went really well. The other four schools on her list are ones we’ve visited and none of them are sponsor colleges. So really, the only one that makes sense to list as her first-choice school is the one that would give her a full-ride (Ok. Christ. Univ). She’ll have to pay something to attend each of the other four, though we’re still waiting to find out exactly how much that will be. Of course, as you said, we get into the weeds about whether listing a sponsor college as a first-choice could reduce her chances at the $2500 NMSC award, but my daughter thinks she’s inclined to take them at their word that they won’t consider first-choice college when determining the winners of the $2500 scholarships. And, as she and you both have said, it’s a small number who receive those anyway. The odds of her getting one are low, no matter what. Really, it’s all a wonderful problem to have! :-bd
The breakdown of the NMF package at my son’s future school, UTD, includes multiple line items that all scholars receive (tuition, fees, on-campus housing stipend, study abroad stipend, etc) plus a variable line item for the official National Merit portion of the package. The variable official portion allows for the incorporation of NMSC-sponsored, corporation-sponsored, or UTD-sponsored National Merit award.
I don’t remember seeing any posts on this thread from families who have a parent who works for one of the NM sponsor corporations, but that’s another piece of the application to think about. In fact H’s old company is a sponsor.
NMSC and at least some NM-sponsor colleges allow the student to choose which NM award to accept if the student is offered more than one. In a hypothetical case where a student is offered one of the NMSC-sponsored awards, but has a parent who works for an NM-partner company and plans to attend an NM-partner college, I believe in most cases the student would be allowed to accept his or her choice of the three NM awards.
If my H still worked for his old company and my S were chosen for an NMSC-sponsored award, UTD and NMSC would allow him to choose. No matter which of the three “official” NM awards he chose he would still get the rest of the UTD NMF package.
So it sounds like there may be an exceptional scenario or two in which more than one national merit sponsored award is actually offered. NMSC should clarify their wording to include the information that every recipient can use no more than one award. As is they say no recipient can be offered no more than one award which obviously is a bit confusing and potentially inaccurate.
Good luck to all of who are NMF contenders -may your school choices and scholarships be numerous. Yes – it is a wonderful problem to have. And just think: next year at this time you will be able to render advice and a lot of confusion to a whole new generation of hopeful contenders and parents!
Sorry, I was wrong in my previous post. UTD does incorporate different official scholarship amounts, but on rereading the NMSC rules it’s clear that each student will receive only one offer. So a student would NOT be offered three different scholarships and get to choose one. Sorry for putting bad info out there.
But at least in the case of UTD, the type of official scholarship awarded does not keep the student from receiving the rest of the UTD package (tuition, fees and so forth).
Here’s my guess at how the $2,500 scholarship process plays out:
Each state is allotted X number of $2,500 scholarships based on the state's percentage of the national total of high school graduates.
So, I take it that the kids are only competing with other kids in their home state for one of the scholarships?
Then (my guess) is that a committee breaks-up into a bunch of teams that each get a stack of our kids' records to rate based on academics, school recommendation, student essay, extracurricular activities, PSAT/SAT scores, awards, and employment.
The highest rated students are then awarded the state's allotted number of scholarships.
@LMHS73
I hope you’re right! I think I like my dd’s chances if she’s only competing against others in our state, as long as the committee doesn’t have a thing against homeschoolers. Of course, I know there are some amazing kids everywhere who are doing amazing things, so it’s still a long shot.