<p>My son is entering his senior year of a large (2600 students) high school. He has maintained very good grades, which have improved steadily. He began with a 3.25 GPA in Freshman year, 3.5 in Sophomore year, and now a 3.75 for Junior year. His Verbal sat was 740 and his Math was 720. We were hoping for some type of merit based scholarship, but have run into the issue that his 3 year GPA should be closer to 3.75 with "those" SAT scores. Don't colleges expect students to begin high school without "focus" and look for growth during the high school years, especially maintaining grades while increasing the level (AP and Honors) of classes, and being an active member of two varsity teams during the entire time? I'm shocked that they find it so strange and unexplainable that his early grades might not be reflective of his later work.
What hope for a scholarship is there for the "late bloomer"</p>
<p>OP - 1460 is a good score, and 3.75 Junior year ain’t too shabby either. I don’t know who’s telling you that your son’s a failure for not having better stats … but IMHO you need to be talking with different people.</p>
<p>Stanford doesn’t give merit aid, but I do know they don’t factor in freshman grades, and it’s likely a lot of other colleges are the same way - I would check with the specific schools on your ds’ list.</p>
<p>The problem is that many people go into high school making good grades and continue to do so. Your son in and of himself is not bad, but when distributing scholarship money it is a comparative competition so late bloomers are disadvantaged.</p>
<p>Each college will be different, so you have to look at the merit criteria for each one. Some are very flexible and would probably take into consideration your student’s improvement and others approach it strictly by the numbers, i.e. over 2100 SAT and 3.7 GPA. Some may use <em>or</em> instead of <em>and</em>. The goal of most merit scholarships is to convince the best students to come to their college, so your student needs to be in that top percentage to be considered.</p>
<p>The score and GPA is good, but kind of under radar for Merits in most schools. Even if consider state colleges. For some, he would not qualify for Honors that sometime has a lot of Merit $$ attached. But you should not tell it to him. He is obviously trying hard and achieving results, but he going going against a lot of others who are very close to 4.0. That is just reality. In addition, please, keep in mind that maintaining high GPA as close as possible to 4.0 will result in more Merit $$ at some schools. They are scholarships for returning students and at D’s college, you need to have 3.8 at least to apply. She got ADDITIONAL $6500 for her sophomore year, so since her tuition was covered by automatically renewable scholarships, a lot of her R&B got covered by additional Merit scholarships.</p>
<p>Do a search for threads by momfromtexas. I think you’ll find schools that WILL give merit aid to a student with the OPs son’s stats.</p>
<p>To state the obvious , stat based scholarships are based on…stats. That being said, there are plenty of institutional based scholarships that would not automatically exclude him, but they won’t automatically include him either. Most do consider GPA and rank, not just the test score.</p>
<p>Search “merit aid” on this forum or do a google search (SAT 1450 + scholarships) and a number of scholarships should pop up. It is a tedious search process but if you work at it, you’ll find plenty of schools that will give him some $.</p>
<p>Be aware that most “scholarship” money is for financial need and not for merit. You might be rewarded by being accepted to a school because of merit, that doesn’t mean they’ll give you money for it. I’ll give you a head start with schools that reward National Merit:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/649276-nmf-scholarships-updated-compilation.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/649276-nmf-scholarships-updated-compilation.html</a></p>
<p>If you go to the Class of '13 Acceptances Thread near the top of the Parents board and look at my name, you will see that my son received merit aid - some of it quite generous - at all the schools that accepted him. His stats were similar to those you mentioned. The very top schools may not give merit aid for thsoe stats, but LOTS of other schools will.</p>
<p>Go to a site like Princeton Review and look for schools where your child’s SATs are above the top 25% of scores. That was our strategy and soon Son will be attending a very nice LAC for about half price.</p>
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<p>My theory, based only on personal experience, is that schools that give huge amounts of merit aid (free rides or almost so) to NMFs are placing their eggs in that basket and are a lot less generous with the non-NMF kids. Son (not a NMF) got his smallest offers from the “free rides for NMF” schools and his largest offers from those who only give NMFs an extra thousand dollars or two.</p>
<p>It makes sense-schools only have so much money and they have to divide it up some way. Your goal is to find the school that gives the most money to students like yours.</p>
<p>missypie said: “Go to a site like Princeton Review and look for schools where your child’s SATs are above the top 25% of scores.”</p>
<p>Then look at the USN&WER Big Book for information about what % of students get merit aid and the average merit award.</p>
<p>Here’s some of those figures for some schools:</p>
<p>Oberlin: 17% 11k
U Rochester: 33% 9k
Muhlenberg: 30% 11k
Beloit: 25% 12k
Brandeis: 22% 20k
UVM: 19% 2k
Dickinson: 9% 10k</p>
<p>Good Hunting!!!</p>
<p>Kei
“Love Thy Safeties”</p>
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<p>Great way to research! It’s hard to rely on info from other parents…if their first child got $0, they may call the next child’s offer of $6000 a year “generous.” If their first child got $18,000, they may call $6000 “pathetic.”</p>
<p>Those kind of figures also give you an idea of what the upper limits are. If you can only swing it if your child gets $25,000, you can gauge how likely or unlikely that will be and talk frankly to your child.</p>
<p>Yep, CC is high on anecdotes an drelatrively low on data. Been trying to get info on large university honors programs and most comments are of the “it’s really good and I like it” type. (not whining though) </p>
<p>That %/$ information doesn’t mean a student will get that aid, but when locating financial safety schools it’s best to select someplace that has a track record of giving out a lot of merit aid in the first place. </p>
<p>OP, another sorting method is to select schools with lower list prices (e.g., Penn State vs. U Michigan for out of state is about 10k less).</p>
<p>Kei</p>
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<p>More great advice. I assembled a list of OOS publics for my D…there was a $9000+ difference in OOS tuition between the high and the low. You will easily find a $15,000 a year difference in tution among the various privates.</p>
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<p>Agreed. If you aren’t overly concerned about geography, I would suggest you look at colleges in the South, some of which offer a good education and lavish money upon bright students in an effort to dispel the nation’s impression of Southern schools as academically inferior. (There are, of course, some ways in which they really are inferior, but it’s good to keep in mind that almost any school offers good opportunities for bright, motivated students.)</p>
<p>Auburn, Alabama, Mississippi, Mississippi State, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and Tulsa are major universities that offer fantastic merit aid to students with stats like your son’s. Take a small step down to some nearly-as-good but lesser-known schools such as Alabama-Huntsville, Southern Mississippi, Louisiana Tech, and Arkansas State, and your son could qualify for a full ride.</p>
<p>This isn’t for everyone, but it could be for you. Worth looking into, no?</p>
<p>D. was not NMF, not even close. She got huge Merit $$$ because of her Rank (HS does not even rank, but colleges calculated it anyway), GPA, ACT score. She got them at all schools that she applied. However, she applied to States and one Private, which gave her the most $$ out of all of them. She had additional merit scholarships after freshman year in college for her college GPA.</p>
<p>This thread had some interesting data about merit aid, with some number crunching by Dad’o’2</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/696637-merit-aid-percentage-common-data-set.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/696637-merit-aid-percentage-common-data-set.html</a></p>
<p>^ Out of above thread, I can confirm specifically about Case, where D applied, but has chosen to attend another school. After her merit award we would have to pay $5000 / year out of $33,000 for tuition. Case is well known for their generous packages.</p>
<p>At Ohio University, where my son went to school, the merit awards are automatic, based on GPA and SAT scores. If you are from Ohio, the entire tuition would be paid (4 years) for a gpa above 3.0 and an SAT score above 1400. If you are out-of-state, then the “in-state” portion of the tuition would be paid in full, and $4500 per year for 4 years of the out-of state supplement would be paid (about half of that portion). So, approximately three-fourths of the tuition bill (approx $14,000 per year) would AUTOMATICALLY be awarded as merit aid. In addition, there would be a one-time $750 discount on room and board.</p>