Hopefully the student is participating with the parent in this process. Researching is very important, but that includes listening to good advice from others. Sites such as this can be an excellent source of information, if one is careful to separate the wheat from the chaff.
But a lower EFC does NOT mean increased aid…unless your kids attend colleges that meet full need.
Having NMF is good but it may not be sufficient to get large scholarships at schools that do not offer scholarships to NMF. For the NMF that are not within the top 1 percentile but really need merit aids, one should really consider those schools offer scholarships to NMF automatically (or most likely). My D did apply to and get accepted by a couple of them. At the end, she goes to an in state flagship that do not offer anything to NMF. Is it a waste? Not at all. The decision is made by the student and parents. If it is disappointing, it is not the outcome but what led to it.
This parent started a thread in March…and never returned to it. Now this one…wondering why the advice given in March wasn’t read. Wondering if this is just a place to vent…one post at a time.
The bottom line, however, if this is for real, the family did not have an application list that leveraged the NMF status…with the exception of A&M where the student supposedly got $$$$. If the family chose to,send the kid to a more expensive or unaffordable school, that was their choice…but they did have this supposedly affordable option.
You may be right thumper1 but the advice given here is invaluable info for other NMF students and their parents so it is worth folks’ efforts.
Yes, any merit-seeking student with National Merit status may want to look at this list for scholarships:
http://nmfscholarships.yolasite.com/
My (white) daughter with no hooks was a NMF and received several offers of generous merit scholarships because of her NMF status. The key is to apply to second-tier (in prestige, though not in education) colleges and universities. Look for schools where your scores and GPA are at the very top of the applicant pool.
My son was only Nat’l Merit Commended (though his SAT score was a lot higher than the PSAT predicted) and he got a nice merit scholarship from Oberlin. He didn’t have to fill out a special application. They just gave it to him and we breathed a sigh of relief when he accepted. (Our D ultimately opted for the full-pay school, which was a great fit for her, but very, very hard on our wallet.)
You won’t get merit money from any so-called top tier school. If you are seeking the Ivies, top LACs, Stanford, Cal, etc., then your only hope is financial aid, so it’s best to run the calculators before even applying if loans won’t be sufficient.
You cannot be a prestige-school seeker and hope to get merit money.
We don’t really know what the OP did in searching out merit and scholarship options for their first kid. I also started early, and read voraciously on CC.
Older non-minority hard-working D was NMF. Her #2 choice, GWU, at one time had a guaranteed half tuition scholarship for NMFs; during her application cycle, the GWU website was coy about the offer of any NMF money, saying it was “considered” or similar. Folks on the CC NMF board said that yes, the was scholarship was offered to NMFs if they named GWU their first choice school. D1 asked about the merit money option when interviewing at GWU and was told by the director of admissions that she’d get the best merit money offer applying RD.
Now, GWU may well have changed their policies and philosophy in the intervening years. The point to take away from this story is about some ways to poke hard at how to leverage NMF status, and how to find the best odds of merit money.
In the end D1 went to her first choice full pay school ED where she collected a grand total of $2500 National Merit money from the school, so all of the work I’d put in to find merit money options was “wasted”. But if she’d been turned down by her top choice, I’d have been delighted to find out that we’d be saving over $100k.
Younger non-minority not-as-hard-working-in-high-school D was very much not NMF. But her stats were good enough to get her some nice merit money from Tulane. A hard-working student would certainly get a better offer. She was also admitted ED to her top choice school, but based on her stats and what we knew about some of the other schools on her list (e.g. Chapman, Lewis and Clark) she would’ve gotten enough merit aid to bring COA down to the cost of attending a UC.
Again, reading CC let us know that these schools would be in range for her, and that they offered significant merit aid.
If the OP does come back to get advice on how to not end up in a similar situation with their other children, my suggestion would be to engage with the community here. Ask questions! Read the financial aid forum!
And if the OP doesn’t come back, well, there are other parents out there who may be headed down the same path as the OP. It doesn’t have to go that way for you and your children. Ask for help!
Finding the threads here at CC about automatic merit scholarships took our family’s path in a direction we never expected, and I have said it before, but I will be forever grateful to those here who shared all of that information. My son missed the NMF cutoff by two points, so we did not have NMF opportunities, but he had other stats that opened doors to him and sent a lot of mail his way for months from top universities that I knew we would never be able to afford without going into huge debt, which I was not willing to do. We stayed focused entirely on the list of automatic merit scholarships listed here at CC. My son wanted to go out of state, despite giving up going to great schools in Florida and giving up the in-state tuition and Bright Futures awards. I was willing to help him do so, but he had to apply to schools where he would get enough merit aid to bring the cost at or lower than if he stayed in Florida. He applied to nearly every school on the CC list of automatic merit scholarships, received offers from them all, and, ultimately, chose the University of Alabama. Neither he nor I had ever once considered the University of Alabama before I started visiting the CC forum. Knowledge is power, and CC gave us knowledge that has changed my son’s life, and really our entire family’s as well.
I have twins who will head to college in the Fall of 2016, so I understand the financial concerns. I am babying my old Ford van, hoping it makes it until 2020, when all of my kids will have graduated from college. My collection of rice and beans recipes just keeps growing, and it’s a good thing my family likes rice and beans. I often look at my spreadsheet that I have created for our family budget beginning in August 2016-May 2017. That will be an interesting and challenging year, but it will be made easier because, thanks to merit aid, our costs are about as low as they could be. My twins will be sending in their college applications in about a month. Both could qualify for the same merit aid scholarships at Alabama, and the other schools, but both prefer smaller colleges, and are focused on getting accepted at a smaller liberal arts college in Alabama, not far from Tuscaloosa, where they will get automatic in-state tuition, and, thanks to their stats, should receive significant merit aid there as well and be able to graduate debt-free. They will go ahead and apply at some of the other schools that offer automatic merit aid, because, as we know from spending time here at CC, it always pays to have many safety schools.
I never dreamed all of my kids would go to school in Alabama. Nothing against Alabama the state, but I grew up in California, and am still surprised sometimes as to how I ended up in Florida. To have all of my kids headed to college in Alabama was totally unexpected. They will all receive great educations, debt free. The Ivy Leagues were never on our lists, because they don’t give merit aid, and we were never going to take out loans for undergraduate degrees, not even for an Ivy League school. All of those next tier schools that filled our mailbox with their fancy brochures were wasting their time as well, and for the same reasons.
The best thing that a family in my situation can do is remain open-minded and to seek out as much information as possible. Prioritize your goals. In our case, goal number one was to help my kids get into college, but goal number two was to make that happen debt-free. That immediately whittled our list of schools, since we would never have qualified for any need-based aid. It was going to have to be merit aid all the way, and, thankfully, there are still some universities out there willing to reward based on academic merit. Thanks to CC, we learned about those schools. I am sorry that things did not work out as the OP had hoped.
TAMU was good and did offer to pay for flight and accommodation for kid #1 who was a NMF in 2007, but she didn’t apply. I don’t remember wether it was before application time or not.
Baylor had a big tuition for NMF, but she almost applied. Had all the information in but not submitted.
None of my kids was seriously interested in any area too hot.
USC was the only college in the top 50 that have significant NMF scholarship.
Altho I don’t think the OP is serious, anyone else reading this and wondering about merit for high stats or NMF status:
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The top schools already have tens of thousands of apps from other top stats and NMF students, so they have no need to offer merit to these students. Many of these schools focus on need-based aid.
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The rare top schools that offer some merit awards often use those awards to “fill a gap” in their ethnic or regional reporting numbers. A school that doesn’t have many students from - say - Alaska, may “sweeten the pot” by offering merit.
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Schools that are trying to “raise their profile” (get more high stats students on campus) will often offer merit awards. Look at these schools closely. Some have very few high stats students and/or are suitcase schools. However, some have a strong number of high stats students and are residential universities. Look to see what a school’s upper-quartile numbers are.
Should have applied to ASU. Go Devils!
@chesterton, if they don’t mind staying in-state (and FL is a big state), NCF is a good LAC option.
OP seems to have disappeared just like in the other thread he/she started. It makes me mad to hear this person blow off “good $$$” at TAMU as a disappointment and a waste. A friend of mine would have loved to attend that school but wasn’t able to cut it financially as an OOS student. I don’t understand some people’s arrogance about schools. Take what you can get and go with it.
Unless the aid at TAMU wasn’t that great and they were forced to go with that school. But like other posters are saying, that doesn’t make any sense if the kid was a NMF because they have a pretty good NMF scholarship.
I had something in my drafts folder for this thread that I was trying to delete and it somehow posted! So, never mind.
" From what I have observed, the motivations of schools giving out merit scholarships isn’t primarily to reward our precious pumpkins for their hard work and dedication in HS. It is about attracting the class that they want to attend their institution"
Exactly. The purpose of merit money is to buy the attendance of students who would otherwise be too good for the school.
Why do you think Harvard doesn’t really have any merit money? Nobody is too good for them.
^ That is not necessarily true. There are students in the same class with similar stat but not receiving merit scholarship.
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Exactly. The purpose of merit money is to buy the attendance of students who would otherwise be too good for the school.
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This needs some clarification:
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Yes, schools like HYPSM don’t need to offer merit because all of their students are tippy top. However, schools like UChi, Rice, WashU, and Duke offer merit to a few highly desirable students to poach them from HYPSM. Those schools’ Adcoms are smart enough to determine that a particular applicant will likely get accepted to HYPSM, so they’ll offer merit to the ones that fill some “need” for their school (regional or ethnic diversity or some amazing hook).
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Some schools, particularly commuter/suitcase schools offer merit to students who would “otherwise be too good for the school”. That can be obvious from determining what their upper quartile scores are. If the upper quartile starts at an ACT 25, then obviously someone with an ACT 35 may not find too many other students in the ACT 32-36 range. This is the strategy that @momfromtexas used to find free rides for her kids; one that didn’t have particularly high stats. Her story was in a famous thread here on CC. The risk an OOS student takes when accepting one of these awards is that he/she may be alone at night or on weekends when everyone goes home.
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However, there are some residential schools that do have a good number of high stats students on campus, particularly in the “academic and STEM majors” (English, History, The Classics, Math, Engineering, etc). These schools are still “buying” high stats students, but not because those students are “too good” for the school, but because the school may be growing its size, particularly the academic and STEM majors and needs the new warm bodies to have high stats. The “secret” that many people do not realize is that the strongest students at a school are typically concentrated within about 12-15 majors; they aren’t spread equally across a schools’ 80+ majors. The upper quartile scores are often ACT 29+.
If the OP is real, he/she likely believed the hype heard by naive people: “Oh your child is so smart, schools will pay YOU for her to attend. She’ll get a scholarship to Harvard, for sure!”
Agree that that comment about students otherwise being “too good for the school” is off the mark. Yes, schools may cherry pick good/desired students who score in the top range of their admitted students stats (that describes DS #2) but that doesn’t mean the students are “too good”. There were many very strong classmates at his school, who were qualified for, and applied to elite schools. Some of his classmates are in top med and grad schools ( off the top of my head, I recall that one of his roommates is at Columbia Med and classmate at Cal Tech in a PhD program). Strong, top caliber students aren’t necessarily “too good” for a particular school, and wouldn’t consider themselves so. What is the difference between a student applying for merit money at a school where their stats are top, and any student applying to a safety school?
Well, some might not. But that’s a different matter…