Are Out of student (OOS) eligible for any merit based aid at UUIC? has anyone from out of Illinois has received any merit based award as a freshman. Thanks
Does UUIC offer 10 Chancellor’s Scholar spots for out-of-state candidate?
Illinois doesn’t even give merit aid to it’s own instate students, it’s highly unlikely for out of state students to get anything.
no they definitely do give merit, not a ton, but they do
There are merit awards, but my impression is that you have to have nearly perfect academics to earn one. Perhaps a little easier in to earn one in less competitive majors than more competitive ones like CS. Unless you have a Harvard/Stanford type of application, the larger 4-year awards and full tuition scholarships generally appear to go to those with hooks, like URM/donor/etc. There are reports of OOS merit awards as well, but assume they seem to be a lot more competitive to earn than at many other state flagships such as Minnesota, Indiana, OSU, Indiana, Iowa, etc.
They are holding back more for in-state as well, but merit also may have a need component. Many perfect applicants from our Chicago suburban high school got nothing in merit from UIUC. It is highly unlikely to get a good package from them.
I went to a suburban Chicago high school, and I know plenty of people at UIUC who got merit aid (including myself). This was 3 years ago though so it might be different now.
My son went to a suburban high school and graduated with a 4.0/4.7 GPA, perfect ACT, perfect SAT2 tests and a ton of AP 5 credits and solid but not above average EC. He received a partial freshman engineering merit award for one year. He entered with over 60 hours of credits, took an impressive course load, aced all his first year with an A+ in classes where it was offered and received a much smaller continuing merit award for next year. This year, my daughter was offered a little more merit aid and a research grant in a less competitive major. She had over 3.9/4.3 GPA and 32 ACT along with excellent leadership EC. They had no hooks or financial need.
We are aware of a number of people who received larger or 4-year merit awards even with lower objective grades and scores, but all had non-academic hooks of some type. So, if you don’t have anything amazing but academics going for you, I wouldn’t count on merit aid and would consider it a bonus if you receive an award, especially if you are out of state. If you have impressive athletics, minority status, significant financial need, amazing subjective EC/essay or something, that may be much more important than objective academic numbers from many comments I’ve seen and received. If you are applying to an over subscribed major like some in Engineering or Business, it’s even more difficult. Being a major donor or connected probably doesn’t hurt either, given previous admissions scandals. Good luck!
@illinoisx3 The only ones in our suburban Chicago high school who got any significant merit were kids who had other hooks, or had significant financial need on top of it. Solidly middle class kids with perfect stats got a small one year only scholarship - something like $2K for engineering. The last couple of years very few got any merit to speak of unless they had other hooks like athletics, URM. Most scholarships are need based, not merit.
Though I did see in the news recently that due to so many high stat kids being wooed away by OOS scholarships, there will be a new non-need based merit scholarship available for high performing students. It’s called the Aim High Grant proram, and it was recently passed. At least Illinois is finally recognizing that the flagship has become increasingly unaffordable for residents.
The bill is here if anyone has interest: