<p>Seriously, how many of these types of events can one student endure?? How much $ are we willing to shell out to attend these weekends? Seems like a very good student could potentially be invited to one of these deals by every school they apply to...</p>
<p>As long as the dates don’t conflict, and there is a potential for a full-ride, I say attend all of them.</p>
<p>Yep–we had 5 invites and one “mail in” for our S. One school he applied to doesn’t do “scholar weekend–no merit aid”, the rest gave merit aid automatically with no higher awards. He was pretty busy for a while. The opportunity for the money, however, was too good to pass up and we could drive, a long way, to most of them. He passed on one of the invites, attended 3 and mailed in the last. In our experience and in talking to others, the kids that got these big awards either had a big financial need for them or were someone the school wanted in a big way–mostly the financial need component though. In chatting with people at these weekends, previous winners fell into the FA category and only about half of the kids that got the award attended the school. I think too much interest in a school plays against you :D. That was our experience anyway.</p>
<p>If its any consolation. We have friends who have a D at W&L on a Johnson scholarship (full ride). Both parents are MD’s and work at Vandy which would pay a large portion of the tuition…so some kids actually get merit based solely on merit.</p>
<p>agree- go to all of the top contenders if you can</p>
<p>DS did scholarship weekends at 5 schools. At his top choice they don’t give merit aid without a visit. He got good merit at all but one school after the weekend and got enough merit from his top choice to make the school affordable.
We noticed that if you are looking for schools that have these scholarship weekends they generally have lower overall GPA requirements and are considered “safety schools”. They also require EA applications. Once in, the real work begins with additional essays and scholarship competitions. It makes sense to weed out those that aren’t really interested in the schools.</p>