<p>great new blog post analyzing UR scholarships!</p>
<p>“What</a> kind of scholarship can I get?” – Office of Admissions and Financial Aid</p>
<p>It was interesting reading, but doesn’t give me a clear idea of how much merit aid my daughter might qualify for. She has just started her college search, is there anywhere that might give average stats for a certain level of merit $$?</p>
<p>Unfortunately no. UR uses a holistic approach in awarding merit. UR uses merit to attract not only high achieving students, but also to increase geographic and ethnic/racial diversity. </p>
<p>The only guaranteed merit goes to NM Finalists. ($17,000/year.)</p>
<p>If you have a high achieving student, the one sure way you can improve your chances for merit is to move to South Dakota, Wyoming or one of the other less well represented states.</p>
<p>Why let this issue affect where your daughter applies? If you qualify for financial aid, you’ll likely get a mix of grants and merit awards and some loans. If you don’t, you may get some merit aid. This is true of all private universities and many public ones,</p>
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<p>Maybe because there’s no reason to apply somewhere if there’s no hope of paying for it if she’s accepted?</p>
<p>But how do you know? Merit aid isn’t financial aid. If you can’t pay for school, then you probably qualify for some form of financial aid and even that, despite the forms you have to fill out, varies tremendously from school to school for the same person. You don’t know what you’ll get until the envelope or email arrives. </p>
<p>Some schools list criteria for basic merit awards: x grades, x scores gets y money. Some of those are actual merit awards but many are really discounts to attract better students. At least this isn’t law school: read about how law schools offer big dollars to attract high LSAT scoring students but they set GPA requirements which guarantee only a percentage get renewed. That’s kind of bait and switch; they try not to tell you the percentage of people who each year lose their awards. That doesn’t happen in undergrad and UR in particular has very low requirements for renewing awards.</p>
<p>According to the FA calculator on URoch’s website, my D would need substantial merit aid. Yes, I know that calculator provides only an estimate. Also, most of our family’s income comes from a small business whose profits swing wildly from one year to the next. She might well qualify for a nice FA package one year and a much smaller one the next.</p>
<p>I didn’t say anything about letting this limit where my D applies, I just didn’t see much value in the blog post about how scholarships are awarded. We won’t qualify for need based aid; both of my older kids chose schools with merit scholarships. I can’t find anything on the Rochester website except ‘merit scholarships range from $2000 to full tuition’. Thanks WayOutWestMom for the NM information, she may qualify for that.</p>