<p>How is Penn State in terms of merit scholarships? Do they typically give any money if you have decent stats or not? </p>
<p>ACT 34, SAT 1420 (CR+MA) / 2020 (total), GPA 4.4 (W) / 3.7 (UW)
Girl majoring in Bioengineering from OoS (NC)
NHS, other usual ECs and volunteer work</p>
<p>while PSU gives out a large amount (total), it has to spread it out over a large number of students. Their philosophy is to try to reduce the costs of an education to as many students as possible. There is less of a separation between top students and average. So the answer would have to be no. It has, and will, continue to get worse. As the state expects PSU to absorb more of its costs while keeping in-state tuition, and tuition over all, low the monies that other schools use for things like these scholarships (what you and others call merit-based scholarships) has to now be applied to other things. The state support has dwindled to a trickle. Ironically, schools like Pitt and Temple get a larger percentage of their budget from the state than PSU does. Go figure. PSU gets more dollars , but as a percentage of budget or corrected for the number of students it gets less. For reasons I’m not sure the legislators seem not to be concerned with placing conditions on pitt and temple.
I’m sure you are applying there too, but NC schools do very well with state funding and thus, keep tuition low.
There are college-specific scholarships at PSU, which I consider to be true or purely merit based that are very generous. These are not need based and the competition is exceptionally high. The ones I am aware of tend to be filled by Ivy-league caliber students, and I’m not talking Cornell or Brown here, the top ivies, UChicago etc.</p>
<p>Hi Coleman,</p>
<p>First, congratulations on your statistics, and I hope that you will consider applying to Penn State. Based on what luvthej asserts, I’m not sure if the following will still hold true for this year, but it may provide some additional points for your review.</p>
<p>Thread from last year discussing scholarships:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/penn-state-university-park/1430986-psu-announces-new-scholarship-funding-freshmen.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/penn-state-university-park/1430986-psu-announces-new-scholarship-funding-freshmen.html</a></p>
<p>Also the number of Pennsylvania high school graduates is projected to decline to 137,026 by 2015-16 possibly impacting the number of applications to Penn State? </p>
<p>Lastly, there are “Scholarship Opportunities for Future First-Year Students” that require an additional application process listed on the COE website which you may want to review. There are deadlines associated with those competitive scholarships.</p>
<p>Good luck with your decision making!</p>
<p>You’ll likely get some minimal scholarship dollars. Not anything significant to cover a lot of OOS tuition though. </p>
<p>Most people here seem to be on a large outside scholarship, burying themselves in debt, or are from well off families.</p>
<p>Resurrecting this thread now that my daughter got accepted. They have a link where you can ‘accept your offer online’ and indicates “Details about fees and housing can be viewed through that system before you complete the process.” but I’m nervous to click the button just to view those details (not ready to decide this early). IF you are going to get any scholarship money, when would you find out about that generally? - Is it already included in those “details about fees” or would that come at a later time?</p>
<p>Nevermind on my question above… I opened the ‘accept your offer…’ and it doesn’t have financial stuff but looks like that comes out in March, like most other places.</p>
<p>I’ve got a kid with very similar stats & had the exact same question. My experience with my other kids was that the offers came with the acceptance letters, so I had thought that Penn St had offered nothing. We’ll see what the offer looks like in March and compare it to the other schools. Thanks for clicking the ‘accept offer’ link. I wasn’t willing to do that.</p>