<p>Hi Everyone, I'm new to this forum and I am the parent of a student who was accepted Early Decision. My friend's son applied Regular Decision and he is a semi-finalist in the Richmond Scholar's program. He is not even likely to attend Richmond. Admissions says that ED candidates are eligible for scholarships, but why would they award a scholarship to someone who has no choice but to attend. Just wondering how many ED candidates are semi-finalists for scholarships?</p>
<p>I believe the Richmond Scholars application deadline is the same as the ED deadline. All ED applicants are automatically put into the pool for Richmond Scholars. I don’t believe there is a correlation between ED and RD for Richmond Scholars. I believe that the sages in Admissions review all the RS applicants independant of enrolment type. I am also but a mere parent of a student so I don’t know this for certain - just my assumptions based on my limited experience.</p>
<p>I’m only a student so I don’t know exactly what goes on but I know that schools tend to award more scholarships to RD students than ED students. They do this to try to pursued RD students to attend. They know they have ED students for sure so they are working on trying to get the top students from RD to attend.</p>
<p>I am a current Richmond Scholar and from mostly what I have seen is that a lot of Scholars applied to UR as a safety and so did not ED.</p>
<p>That’s sad. So the school is giving money(lots of it) to kids who don’t really want to be there instead of those that do.</p>
<p>I have no connection to Richmond, but last year all of the colleges my D applied to had merit scholarship deadlines that corresponded to their priority admission deadline. So, if you applied regular decision or missed the priority deadline, you didn’t get merit scholarships. I think this was to give money to the students that were interested enough to do their applications early. None of her schools had ED though. I can’t imagine that they would penalize a well qualified student because he/she applied ED. The main downside to ED, that I understand, is that you have to decide prior to finding out what financial aid you might be awarded.</p>
<p>@robsamg Well, it is merit money, so presumably should be merit based only.</p>
<p>Colleges use merit money in part as a marketing tool to get students who might attend otherwise. </p>
<p>Often ED students use that process to get into a college they would have trouble getting into otherwise. Unfortunately since they have committed they college has little incentive to give money, but most college are still quite fair on financial aid. I have read where Richmond will give merit money to strong upperclassmen, something I have never heard of anywhere else.</p>