All in all how many merit scholarships are there at T20 colleges? Don’t include need based aid, athletic or outside scholarships, only pure merit scholarships from colleges themselves.
Define T20 colleges.
T20= Harvard, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Columbia, Rice, Johns Hopkins, U Chicago, Williams, Northwestern, Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Vanderbilt, U Penn, Pomona, Cornell.
Usual suspects who make all ranking lists and have lowest acceptance rates.
I don’t know how many scholarships any of these schools give. I know which ones do give merit money, non financial aid funds, but how many given each year? No idea. CommonData has that info, I believe.
Some of the awards are hardly to make much a dent in the cost. Stanford gives research grants, I know in $1-5k amounts. I had heard the same about Harvard—some scholarships school related but not from the school, small amounts. But for most of these schools, getting a pure Merit award of any impact amount is rare. Very rare. Duke, Rice, Hopkins ,Vanderbilt, Chicago, Northwestern, Emory give money.
According to USNWR
UF is 35 full ride for NMF
USC is 22 - half tuition for NMF
All Texas schools give the first year of tuition free for in state high school validictorians, UT Austin is 49
So if you widen your search a bit there are plenty of good schools that give merit scholarship. Not sure how the tippy top schools would be able to figure which kids to give merit scholarships to since all their admitted students have amazing stats if they don’t have some other hook and even those with a hook have great stats.
Personally I think you need to look at individual programs and not USNWR ranking.
There are plenty of full rides available for National Merit Scholars at less selective public and private schools, if that’s the case then getting a free education shouldn’t be an issue.
@CupCakeMuffins are you calling schools like UF “less selective”?
As far as I understand, they generally do not have many merit scholarships. They generally only have financial aid for meeting need. That being said, there are a few, like the Tanner Dean’s Scholarship at Cornell. You’d probably need to check each college to figure that out.
Vanderbilt offers several merit scholarships. The Cornelius Vanderbilt Scholarship is four-year full tuition plus a stipend for a summer program. I think they award about 150 per year.
UF does not give any full scholarships for NMF. Those come from a state agency and can be USED at UF (or other schools). Other school in the T-20 listed by OP (post #2) may have the same arrangement with public or private organizations to give grants or scholarships to students.
Most of the schools listed by OP offer no merit from the schools directly.
In this thread I’m only asking for information about the schools I listed. I apologize for narrowing it down and not asking for personal opinions or initiating debates.
many of the state schools that offer national merit scholarship get funds from their state DD was NM at OU and part of the her NM scholarship came from the state’s regents (all the other state schools got money from the sate’s regents for NM too) Texas A&M cobbles together a variety of different scholarships to cover their NM scholarship. THis is very common and most don’t care where the money comes from, only how where it can be used. I know that’s what I care about;-)
I’m pretty sure that the Cornelius Vanderbilt scholarship looks at leadership and comminity service as well as merit, at least that what the kids from our high school that got that scholarship said during their presentation.
@3scoutsmom UF’s acceptance rate is 44% so compared to other schools mentioned here (with acceptances rates <20%), it IS less selective.
The Ivies do not give merit scholarships (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Cornell). MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and Amherst don’t either. The rest may have a small number of competitive merit scholarships; check out their scholarship web pages to see what you can find.
We’ll there you have it unless you have parents willing and able to pay $60/$70K a year for a “Top 20” school your only hope is to have finacial need, or a hook that the school is willing to pay students for, or you’ll have to settle for “less selective schools” like UF. If you only need half off tuition you could go for USC, maybe they are more selective?
This info is easily obtainable by looking at each college’s website. In addition to the colleges that @evergreen5 mentioned, I know that Williams does not offer merit aid. So we’ve now eliminated 13 colleges from your list. All you have to do is look at the websites of seven colleges.
Wash U has a few highly competitive merit scholarships, and makes some top 20 lists depending on the year and who is doing the ranking.
14/20 schools on OP’s list doesn’t offer ANY merit scholarships. Only 6 ( due to South & Midwest location disadvantage against NE & Cali schools) still does offer few merit scholarships (mostly 1/2 tuition) and those offers are like unicorns, more elusive and hard to chase than admission at Harvard or Stanford.
With their selective picking rate, you have to be really extraordinary for them to want you enough to offer you an incentive to reject HYSPM acceptance or full rides from less selective schools.
All 20 schools have really generous need based financial aid policies for eligible families.
IOW, students who need to chase merit cannot chase it at these schools. Getting merit at these schools usually comes as a shock. It’s intended to lure the student away from HYPS.
Merit awards can be found on the college website. I must warn you that an acceptance to a school such as Vanderbilt is very difficult…Vanderbilt has an acceptance rate under 10%. Getting merit at such schools is tough…they tend to give it to those who also get accepted to Harvard.
If you need merit I would revise your plan, but to answer your question I know there are awards at Duke, Vanderbilt, Wash U.