No one is breaking their rules. You just don’t seem to understand how it all works.
School A offers a big NMF award
Free tuition
Free housing
$1000 per year <<=== that portion would be the “official NMF award processed by NMCorp”
John Doe is an NMF whose parent works for a company that offers an official NMF award of 2500 per year processed by NMCorp
John Doe chooses to attend School A.
NMCorp contacts John Doe because he’s chosen School A as his “First Choice School,” but his parent’s employer wants to give him $2500 per year. NMCorp wants John Doe to get the most money possible, so advises him to decline the “official $1000 per year from School A,” and accept the “official $2500 per year from the corporation”
So John Doe ends up getting:
Free tuition
Free housing …which are the unofficial part of the School A’s NMF award
$2500 per year…which is the official Corporate award
John Doe gets $1500 more per year this way.
John Doe is named one of the 7400 Nationa Merit Scholars and receives by mail his certificate from NMCorp.
@mom2collegekids Thank you so much for explaining this! I can tell you know what you are talking about from your experience. I’ve been driving myself crazy trying to figure out if a corporate award would knock my son out of a large (apparently unofficial) offer from a school. Glad to hear that they help you get the best offer etc.
The National Merit Corporation really doesn’t help anyone get the best offer… its up to the student/parent to figure it out. My son was offered the $2500 merit scholarship and I didn’t know what to do. The school he was attending offered tuition, 4 years room and $1,000 per year for the National Merit portion. There wasn’t a conflict with the room and tuition portion (that was a separate, awarded because he was a NMF) but there was a conflict with the $1,000 p/year award as now he would potentially be losing $1500. I contacted his school-to-be and they said in THEIR case there was no problem. My son should accept the $2500 award (I don’t know if you can NOT accept it) but they would still pay him except for the first semester. So in HIS CASE from HIS UNIVERSITY he got $2500 from NMF, and then $500 per semester for the next 6 semesters from the university (he graduated one semester early otherwise it would be for 7 semesters). This university is very generous. I am not sure how other universities handle this. I wouldn’t worry about the “unofficial portion” though as this really has nothing to do with the National Merit Corporation.
@kjcphmom NMCorp not only helped our son get the best offer, but “out of the blue” they called us to get approval of what they believed to be the best offer.
If anyone is unsure that he/she might not get the best financial situation, please call NMCorp to discuss options.
^ We didn’t have the same experience with them when I called. Hopefully my case was the exception then. I can’t tell you how grateful we are for the NMF opportunities. Two of my kids were National Merit Finalists and were able to fine universities debt free.
Re: best NMF scholarships…my son only applied to warm weather universities…in that regard, he was offered amazing merit scholarships at full tuition scholarships at Alabama, Arizona State, Baylor and Oklahoma, plus large scholarships at U of Arizona and Minnesota. We are waiting on USC which offers half tuition scholarships IF you get in, which is no easy task. I’d encourage you to look at all the above and if you are open to East/North East, check out RIT, Drexel, Northeastern, Boston College
Boston University does - $20K. Unfortunately, Drexel stopped offering it this year- curious to see what that will do to their admission stats and ‘all important’ ranking. I’m sure they will lose a lot of high stats kids that were applying for the scholarship.
The program is pretty confusing. The way I think about NMF is this- If you make Finalist, the ball is in the student’s court. They are guaranteed to get a large scholarship of they choose (and get accepted to) a university that offers automatic tuition to NMF. If they end up going somewhere else- then its a bit more random. They have a chance of getting a corporate scholarship (if they happen to have the right relationship with a corporate sponsor) or get a $2500 award from NMC (which they have to be selected for). That is why out of 15K NMF, only 7400 students get something. In theory, if every finalist (15K students) choose to attend Alabama or another auto tuition school, there would be 15,000 winners (which would never happen).
I’m guessing that NMC has a variable amount of $2500 awards each year. Hypothetically- If 5000 kids win the tuition scholarships, and 1000 win corporate, then they may give 1400 awards at $2500 a piece (this gets them to the magic 7400 winners total). Another year, they may have 4000 kids win tuition scholarships, 1000 corporate, and they give 2400 awards. Not sure if this is correct, but if they have a fixed number of winners they are striving for, there must be a plug somewhere.
For those wondering why it takes NMS so long to run the program and announce winners, this is one of the reasons. Its a complicated contest to implement.
My son was a NMF and received letters from Univ Texas Dallas and Univ Oklahoma for full tuition and stipends for study abroad. He was accepted ED to Duke however and they don’t offer any NM scholarships.
Around 90% of National Merit SemiFinalists get notified that they are National Merit Finalists in early February, about a month before any get notified of getting a scholarship. You MUST be a National Merit Finalist to even be eligible to become a National Merit Scholar from any of the three types of scholarships.
The National Merit Scholarship Corporation ITSELF lists winners of any type of the three awards as a Merit (copywrited) Scholar meaning a “National Merit Scholarship Corporation” Scholar in their annual report in the numbers of NMScholars attending various schools. Schools like Alabama and Oklahoma that have college-sponsored awards have 200-300 Scholars. Those are certainly NOT all $2400 winners. \
My D and S were both winners of National Merit corporate-sponsored awards. In both cases, press releases published by National Merit declared them as winners of “National Merit” Scholarships. They are National Merit Scholars. AND they each accepted one of those large college scholarships (One at Oklahoma and the other at ASU) AND both still received the corporate-sponsored award in lieu of the small official NM college-sponsored part).
Well, perhaps it has changed. I was a National Merit Corporate Scholar. My award never said that I was a National Merit Scholar, and I was careful to make that distinction on my resume in college.
The college-sponsored and Corporate recipients do not have to pass the final competitive round of screening. They are not chosen by National Merit in their process to determine National Merit winners. So while those scholarships are indeed administered by National Merit, they are University or Corporate scholarships and have instead met the requirements of those sponsors. In many cases it’s as simple as enrolling or parents being employed.
Corporate-sponsored scholarship winners are selected by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation from names supplied to them by the company. In many cases, these are competitive. There are actually many cases of competitive college-sponsored awards too, but the ones that are packaged with the large awards that are guaranteed to all Finalists who attend the school are often the most publicized.
The first is a link to a news report showing an advertising video clip by David Boren repeatedly claiming that Oklahoma “leads the nation in National Merit Scholars enrolled.” The last two are right off of OU’s website. Alabama publishes similar claims. A significant majority of these are college-sponsored winners (267 out of 313 total at Oklahoma last year). You can bet that National Merit Scholarship Corporation would crack down on these claims that have been published for several years now if they did not condone calling all NMSC scholarship winners of any type a National Merit Scholar.
My 2 daughters, who both received small National Merit Scholarships Sponsored by the University of Richmond, just recently received letters from the NMSC. The sophomore needs to renew her scholarship through the NMSC website. The senior’s letter is actually addressed “Dear Scholar” and asks her to fill out a survey, as this is the last year of her NM scholarship. UR sent them both certificates naming them “National Merit Scholars” when they accepted the scholarships as entering freshmen.
D was a National Merit FINALIST (not scholar). She applied to U Kentucky as a financial aid safety and received a FULL RIDE (full tuition and full housing) When all was said and done I think we would have had to pay $78 a semester (not sure what it was for).
This is an automatic scholarship. However I remember the wording being strange in their website. They WANT NMFs to attend.
Corporate-Sponsored scholarship offers are already being received. The $2500 awards will be offered in late March. so Finalists should start receiving those soon. Offers of the official parts of the college-sponsored awards get mailed from NMSC starting May 1st.
@cchelp2019 Kentucky is one of those schools with very generous scholarships for National Merit Finalists from their own funds apart from NMSC. If your D had accepted the offer and committed to attend, she would have received notification of the official NMSC college-sponsored part in a letter from NMSC sometime after May 1st. That would have then made her a National Merit Scholar.
I recently received a $2500 national merit scholarship award from NMSC, but some of the colleges that I'm thinking of going to are not sponsors for the national merit awards. For instance, I don't think the Ivy League colleges are sponsors, and neither are the schools in the University of California system. Will these schools still accept this award from NMSC, or is this just a scholarship that I can't even use if I go to one of these schools?
Thanks for all the help!