<p>Did you miss what I said about my D being admitted to Swarthmore? They award NO NMF money there, and she was not awarded one of the $2,500 ones – those are entirely separate award processes, so they don’t somehow try to synch it up so everyone gets money. If she had chosen Swat, she would have had no NMF money. And no Ivy league colleges give NMF awards of any kind. In fact, I bet maybe 20% of NMFs end up without a dime because they attend Ivies and aren’t part of those other two pools of money. Schools that have a lot of NMF applicants and low admission rates don’t need to offer the money to draw the NMF students, so many of them don’t do it. </p>
<p>If you don’t believe me, go to the financial aid website of every Ivy and see if they say anything about NMF scholarships. They don’t because they don’t exist there.</p>
<p>Maybe you don’t understand that the scholarship money is not all controlled by the NMSC. As far as I can tell they only control (1) who is an NMF, (2) giving out the $2,500 one-time scholarships to about half of the NMF pool – that is NMSC money, (3) announcing NMFs, and (4) I think they put some rules around the scholarships offered by the colleges and corporations that are called “National Merit Finalist” scholarships – but the money for those college and corporate scholarships comes from the college or corporation, not NMSC – and not all colleges choose to participate in the NMF scholarship program.</p>