<p>I'm hearing how hard engineering is and how tough the grading is for engineering classes. That's okay I guess. But since schools hold all majors to the same scholarship GPA standard, no matter how hard the major, I'm learning it's harder for engineering students to keep their scholarships.</p>
<p>My S will be a freshman at a school to be determined in the fall as an engineering student. He's applied mostly to UCs, but also to one private school (USC) that throws lots of money at freshman. </p>
<p>I'm nervous about making a college choice based in part on merit money then having him then struggling to keep a 3/3.5/whatever to keep a scholarship. For example, picking UC Davis instead of UCLA b/c Davis offers a Regents scholarship. Or picking USC b/c they offer half/full tuition that makes it at least initially cost no more than a UC. But then lose the scholarship. </p>
<p>No easy answer, I know, but any engineering students on merit aid out there care to weight in?</p>
<p>It is definitely an issue to consider when accepting scholarships. You have to know your student well and think about how well they will handle the stress associated with maintaining a high GPA as an engineering student. Making the required GPA may very well mean that your student must curtail his/her social life and put many more hours into studies than other students. One of my kiddos can handle the stress, one of them would not be able to. Good luck with the decision.</p>
<pre><code>You make an excellent point. Students and parents need to look at the costs if the student loses the scholarship. I have long argued that engineering students need to be held to a different standard than other students, but the officials at my institution (University of Arkansas - Fort Smith) want to keep a common GPA requirement. This is pretty much what every school does. When schools give out scholarship money they do so with the belief that a certain percentage will lose it after one year, 2 years, etc. In fact only a small percentage keep their scholarship for all four years (and actually graduate in that time).
I often tell students and parents to "take the best deal" you can get. But you need to look at the total cost with and without the scholarship. I would suggest calculating two years with the scholarship and two without, which should give a reasonable estimate.
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<p>What you suggest makes sense. It's quite hard to predict how a 17/18 year old will do at college for the first time, studying something s/he has never studied before. My S has pretty much breezed thru high school so far with tough quantitative classes and mostly A's. He hasn't had to chose between social life and academics yet, or work very hard. He'd claim he works hard, but I've been thru college and he ain't working hard yet.</p>
<p>Question: Once you lose your scholarship due to a bad quarter/semester, is it generally gone for good? Can you earn it back the next year? </p>
<p>I hope you, Dr Reynolds, and your colleagues at other schools continue to advocate for engineering students on scholarship. The same percentage of engineering students should be able to keep their scholarships as other majors. Since engineering is usually a different "college" than liberal arts, it should be fairly easy to set different GPA standards for COE and COLAS within a university, no?</p>
<p>My D had similar full tuition scholarship offers from 2 different eng. schools. One required a 3.5 and the other a 3.0 to maintain scholarship. Although it was not the only factor, my D picked the second school and she said this was one of the items that influenced her decision. It gave her some freedom to try new things (in her case Russian) without worrying so much about GPA (Russian, a 5 hour course, was her only B, so 3.54 GPA first semester).
The other thing I did was advise her that her job was to keep those scholarships. They were worth far more than some minimum wage campus job and that I would provide whatever extra $ she needed her first year.</p>
<p>Workingforblue - excellent advice to your D. I tell every student that their #1 focus should be to keep their scholarship.</p>
<p>hiker - Generally once you lose it, it is gone for good. There may be a probation semester where the student can work hard to get the GPA above the minimum and earn it back.</p>