<p>Can someone tell me what the criteria are for merit scholarships? What SAT score and GPA do you have and what type of scholarship were you awarded?</p>
<p>I’ve talked to the admission office. There is no merit aid at Northwestern. You may find a small percentage on some stat, but that may be for a specific purpose. They do have need based scholarship though. Indeed, if you are accepted into Northwestern, you have a very good merit standing already. The same for Stanford and many other top schools.</p>
<p>Not sure how unusual this is, but we got FA packages from four or five schools, and each left us in just about the same place, even though some called what they were giving “merit aid” or “scholarships” and some just considered it “need-based”. Maybe this was a coincidence, but I kind of doubt it.</p>
<p>If you’re high need, high achieving then having similar packages makes sense. If you’re low need and low achieving (Which you’re not because you’re on the NU board :-D) it’d make sense too.</p>
<p>Merit aid, however, is additional, so they wouldn’t normally come out to be the same. And like Billcsho said, you’re merit aid is pretty much whatever they give you to come, because they want you to come, and you had to have high scores to get in. There is no real way to give merit aid to students that are all mostly at the same level.</p>
<p>There are a few strange merit scholarships however, like one for LA area kids, or something like that, and the 2K National Merit one but there is not much.</p>
<p>We’re relatively low need, around $40K EFC. Two schools, LMU and Occidental, gave my daughter merit scholarships of around $15K each and both threw in a smidge of financial aid. Emory and NU didn’t give us any merit money at all but jacked the FA so we ended up at about the same place.</p>