<p>Half right…but not totally.</p>
<p>Merit is announced with your financial aid package…for RD – that is going to be anytime March 15 - April 15. </p>
<p>For EA and ED-- your Merit is announced with your fin aid package as well. The package isn’t necessarily going to be announced 48 hours after your stuff is in…it’s announced after they get to your file for fin aid purposes. The receptionist said they were starting that process last week for the EA/ED pool…and said, if everything is received, you’ll see the results on the “Where Am I” page 48 hours after it’s snail-mailed…but that means they still have to get to things. They are probably still slogging through the 26,000 RD applicants! At CMU, there is not a separate finaid department for freshman- the ADCOM handles both admissions and financial aid. So their staff is probably swamped!</p>
<p>Merit is very rare…as I wrote a few weeks ago…they really scaled back many of the larger merit scholarships offered in previous years and are spreading more aid to more students. They took a terrible hit in their endowment - as did so many colleges. Rather than giving half and full rides to a hundred or so students…they now give that money to a wider pool to make things more affordable for more students.</p>
<p>That makes good business sense…CMU is way up in the rankings yet again and judging by the continued increase in numbers of applicants, they aren’t having any difficulty attracting very fine students.</p>
<p>Has any ED or EA student received a fin aid package yet?</p>