<p>Thank God for Bama. And for mom2collegekids.</p>
<p>I have no problem at all with a college or university not participating. I do have a problem with people attacking one of the few programs that reward merit. Yes it is a bit flawed. Yes it begins with one test score. It also gives thousands of kids each year a chance to be recognized for performing well on a standardized test.</p>
<p>"they can take out loans to cover the cost and again, if they are such high achievers, they should be able to graduate and get a job which affords them the ability to pay back their loans. "</p>
<p>YIKES, you are making a LOT of assumptions based on other assumptions. </p>
<p>Loans, especially those that cannot be forgiven, are unaffordable if a high paying job CANT be found.
Ever heard of the current RECESSION? or housing crisis? Caused in large part because people took out LOANS based on the ASSUMPTION that house prices will always go up,[ kinda like assuming a student can get a high paying job] and homeowners will be able to refinance again and again. Look where that got us.</p>
<p>“eb-
How can you think that loans are the equivalent of money???”</p>
<p>I don’t. The reward, for the high achiever, is acceptance at top schools and the benefits derived from being educated at one of the best schools in the country.</p>
<p>Just to clear up one source of confusion, the PSAT is administered both on a school day and on the weekend. That’s why some people are talking about a scholarship being predicated on one Saturday morning test.</p>
<p>Doing well on the PSAT is one path to getting some substantial merit aid, but it’s of course not the only path. It’s in some ways one of the most transparent sources of merit aid. Here on CC we have threads listing schools that offer automatic merit for certain SAT/ACT scores and GPA, and threads about how to hunt for merit aid. Out in the rest of the world most people know nothing about this. I’d guess that even most high school counselors don’t know about these kinds of opportunities. </p>
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<p>If you mean here the National Merit scholarship, it varies enormously in amount. Yes, there are some schools (and NM itself) that give relatively small awards, on the order of $2k. Some schools offer NMFs a full ride, paying for tuition, books, housing, the whole deal. Others offer enough money to make the COA similar to paying for a student’s in-state public. </p>
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<p>What, he’s earning seven figures? 
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<p>Agreed. It’s worked very well at, for instance, USC.</p>
<p>“FAFSA does nothing to level the field for COL in each region.”</p>
<p>FAFSA doesn’t but most top schools require CSS which does take that into consideration (among other things that they also factor in.)</p>
<p>^“Well, at least Natl Merit attempts to level the field by having the cutoff different in each state.
FAFSA does nothing to level the field for COL in each region.”</p>
<p>While FAFSA does not give a break to people living in expensive area, NM is actually penalizing people who live in expensive area with higher cutoff.</p>
<p>“Loans, especially those that cannot be forgiven, are unaffordable if a high paying job CANT be found.”</p>
<p>We are talking about the best and the brightest students in this thread, no? That changes significantly the impact (or lack thereof) of taking out loans.</p>
<p>Plenty of money to pay college football coaches in this country, but not enough for national merit scholarships !!! </p>
<p>Further, while I only received a 1200 on my SATs, back in the olden days before they had a writing section, it has been my experience in life that those people who score high on the SATs are in fact very bright people.</p>
<p>Just because some groups don’t do as well on the test as others doesn’t mean there is something wrong with the test.</p>
<p>Standardized tests are critical. How else can a college compare the 3.8 Joe Smith got in high school in Iowa to the 3.8 Mary Jones got in New York City?.</p>
<p>My son received an 800 CR and 800 in writing. A college can pretend those scores don’t mean anything, but most thinking, non politically correct people, know otherwise. </p>
<p>I am always amazed when some kid on CC says that he is valecdictorian of his high school class, but he only has a 1900 SAT, or a 28 ACT. To me, this just shows either grade inflation, or that the high school is not very competitive.</p>
<p>Let us not forget that the kids admitted to colleges will one day be our doctors and engineers. Do we really want to ignore kids who kid 2300 on their SATs, and pretend their scores mean nothing?</p>
<p>Colleges today, in my view, have a preconceived notion of the racial make-up of their freshman class, and work backwards to achieve those numbers. High SAT scores stand in the way of this process, because it is hard to take someone who has an 1800 SAT over someone who has a 2300 SAT with a straight face, so they simply declare the test to be no good.</p>
<p>If the SAT is no good, then why is it that my son received the exact same percentile on the ACT ???</p>
<p>My son’s school has been SAT optional for years and their research has shown there is no difference in the achievement in college between kids who reported their scores or those which didn’t.</p>
<p>Colleges also know a schools profile and what their GPA’s mean.</p>
<p>There was a time when NYU could not attract large numbers of kids with stats like those of NMFs, so it offered money to attract them, by participating in the NM Program. Now, NYU can find kids with similar and sometimes better stats than the average NMF who applies, so they are probably ditching the NM program.</p>
<p>There are probably many kids in places like CA, NJ, MA, CT etc with PSAT scores between 205 and 220, who are not NMFs. These kids would be NMFs in other states and as NMFs would be offered full rides at schools such as U of Alabama, Arizona, Oklahoma etc. However, these schools have decided to give free rides to NMFs only. Thus kids with scores as low as 205 from certain states are getting free rides as NMF, but these kids with higher scores are not. So, it seems, NYU and others are ditching the NM program so they can attract these kids whose scores are higher than many low scoring NMFs.</p>
<p>“There are probably many kids in places like CA, NJ, MA, CT etc with PSAT scores between 205 and 220, who are not NMFs. These kids would be NMFs in other states and would be offered full rides at schools such as U of Alabama, Arizona, Oklahoma etc. However, these schools have decided to give free rides to NMFs only. Thus kids with scores as low as 205 from certain states are getting in as NMF, but kids with higher scores are not, since they are not NMFs. So, it seems, NYU and others are ditching the NM program so they can attract these kids whose scores are higher than these low scoring NMFs.”</p>
<p>Maybe the state’s whose public flagship gives a full ride to NMF (for both in state and OOS) should instead spend the money on improving the public elementary and secondary schools in their own states so more kids in their states will be able to get into college in the first place. </p>
<p>IMO, the reason these flagships give full rides to NMF is because their in state student population is so poorly educated they need a very compelling reason (free education) to attract top students. </p>
<p>[State</a> Education Rankings: The Best And Worst For Math And Science](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>State Education Rankings: The Best And Worst For Math And Science | HuffPost Latest News)</p>
<p>I’d be interested in knowing how many of those out-of-state NMSFs who go to Alabama end up settling permanently in the state. If a fair number of them do, it may make a lot of sense to lure them.</p>
<p>“That changes significantly the impact (or lack thereof) of taking out loans.”</p>
<p>more assumptions- again. Brains have nothing to do with whether a family or child can AFFORD to be saddled with student loans that cannot be forgiven or wiped out. ever. </p>
<p>Merit $, Institutional grant money- its ALL money provided by colleges to students they want .</p>
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<p>By that logic, all public schools should discontinue all merit aid, and those funds should be used in the K-12 budget. </p>
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<p>Many schools that offer full rides to NMFs also offer generous merit aid to high-stats students, e.g. [Out-of-State</a> Scholarships - Undergraduate Scholarships - The University of Alabama](<a href=“http://scholarships.ua.edu/types/out_of_state.html]Out-of-State”>http://scholarships.ua.edu/types/out_of_state.html) and <a href=“https://financialaid.arizona.edu/scholarships/terms/2011-2012#arizona_excellence[/url]”>https://financialaid.arizona.edu/scholarships/terms/2011-2012#arizona_excellence</a> . And many other schools that don’t offer National Merit full rides offer generous (even full ride) scholarships to high-stats students. NM is one path, but far from the only one. </p>
<p>Besides, most of those high scoring kids from CA, NJ, MA and CT are not interested in attending U Alabama, Arizona, or Oklahoma, even on a full scholarship. The CA kids would sooner attend Cal or UCLA, the NJ kids will head to Rutgers, and so forth. Or they’ll apply for the half tuition offer from USC…or try for the USC full tuition scholarship.</p>
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<p>I agree completely with Hunt (which is pretty usually the case). Why should NYU feel compelled to do this?</p>
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<p>Sigh, if this were only true. Very, very few schools offer merit only based scholarships to any significant amount. Most of the scholarships have the words “need” or “under represented” attached to them.</p>
<p>vlines, the scholarships I’ve linked to for Alabama and Arizona are merit only, no need-based component. The same thing is true for many other schools offering NM money. Schools that were on D1’s list that offered “significant” NM merit money: Rochester, Macalester, George Washington (though GW doesn’t officially consider it NM). All three of those offer the same level of merit aid to high stats students. She also had Muhlenberg and UMCP on her list…which offer no NM money (OK, UMaryland does give NMFs a free application) but does offer substantial merit money. Pitt was another (though it fell off of her list, though staying on the parental list 
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<p>I would prefer a cutoff system using the socioeconomic index of the student’s school. The higher the percentage of free lunch kids, the lower the cutoff. Why should some rich kid from Mississippi have such an advantage over a working class kid from the Bronx. The current system is no meritocracy.</p>
<p>“more assumptions- again. Brains have nothing to do with whether a family or child can AFFORD to be saddled with student loans that cannot be forgiven or wiped out. ever.”</p>
<p>Not an assumption. There are stats on ROI of attending schools. </p>
<p>[What’s</a> Your College Degree Worth? - Businessweek](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?)</p>