<p>The NMSC just issued its new Annual Report for 2010-11 and Chicago experienced a huge jump in the amount of National Merit winners ($2,500 award) it enrolled. It used to lag behind the lower Ivies significantly before so this is another sign that the student body it's enrolling is getting stronger.</p>
<p>Princeton: 154
Stanford: 139
University of Pennsylvania: 138 (maybe belongs in next tier since it's class size is large)
MIT: 128</p>
<p>Duke: 93
Columbia: 88
Brown: 82 University of Chicago: 81
Dartmouth College: 66 (small class size)
Caltech: 36 (extremely small class size)</p>
<p>University of California, Berkeley: 74 (extremely large class size)
Cornell: 69 (large class size)
Vanderbilt: 65
Northwestern: 57
Washington University in St. Louis: 53
Rice: 49 (small class size)</p>
<p>Notre Dame: 46
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: 42 (extremely large class size)
University of Southern California: 39 (extremely large class size)
University of Virginia: 37 (large class size)
University of California, Los Angeles: 34 (extremely large class size)
Carnegie Mellon: 33
UNC-Chapel Hill (large class size)
Johns Hopkins: 31
Georgetown: 27</p>
<p>Just to note, the 81 students named are those who are recipients of National Merit’s $2,500, one-time award. We also award an institutional scholarship of $1,000 (if a student is not eligible for financial aid) or $2,000 yearly (if a student is eligible for financial aid) to National Merit finalists who opt for our institutional award rather than the national award, which, as you can see on Page 15, was awarded to 174 students.</p>
Good point! I have a question though-isn’t the announcement for the national award made before students accepted to Chicago and other sponsors of the National Merit Scholarship are forced to make a matriculation decision (May 1st)? Can an accepted student to UChicago still get the “honor” of being one of the 2,500 foundation winners but yet accept Chicago’s financial scholarship instead because it ends up amounting to a lot more than the $2,500 awarded by NMSC? I have always been unclear on this.</p>
<p>Unless I’m missing something, UChicago admitted more National Merit recipients than any other school listed (see p. 41). They edged out USC by 1 (and Harvard by 7).</p>
<p>It sounds like goldenboy is pointing to the count of people who got the 2500 from NMSC and not the totals enrolled at Chicago. There is an additional number of 174 people receiving the 4000 or 8000 scholarship from Chicago.</p>
<p>It’s about ENROLLED students: that’s what they say on pay 38-40 when the list all the colleges & Universities. Yes, U Chicago has the LARGEST number of ENROLLED students who got this award. In fact, slightly more than one in six U Chicago freshmen are NM scholars. A scary thought…</p>
<p>Funny thing is, there are some schools though good, not known nationally particularly for academical side of the equation on the tippy top scale that have a very high number (e.g., Auburn). I wonder what’s going on here.</p>
<p>Note: another interesting tid bit: Columbia has only 88 compared (vs U Chicago 255) and vastly underperforms its peers. Curious…</p>
A vast majority of them are National Merit Scholars because Chicago nominates them once they get to the NMF stage and they select Chicago as their #1 choice. So that 255 Chicago student figure is essentially the number of NMFs that the school has enrolling since it sponsors the scholarship.</p>
<p>Columbia does not sponsor the scholarship and if it did, it would have a National Merit Scholar count that is similar but most likely a bit higher than Chicago’s. Out of the elite schools, I think only Northwestern, Chicago and Vanderbilt are sponsor institutions of the National Merit Scholarship.</p>