<p>I am not certain that I understand what percentages are detailed in these charts. Is this the percentage of the 2,000 NMS that matriculated at a particular college or university? Or is this the percentage of NMS students in a first year class at a particular college or university? To illustrate my question: If 200 of the 2,000 NMS matriculated at Northwestern University, then the % is 10%. But if the chart illustrates that the 200 NMS who matriculated at NU joined a freshman class of 1,800, then the percent of the freshman class at Northwestern, for example, is 11.11%. Also, what are the number of NMSF, NMF & NMS for a particular year?</p>
<p>I calculated this as a percentage of an entire class of estimated size and how many NMS a student is likely to encounter over 4 years at college (thus taking into account transfers though not taking into account if NMS students transfers in or out ). I took the undergraduate enrollment numbers from collegeboard.com, divided by four and got the estimated class size. I then divided the # of NMS matriculates by this estimated class size. </p>
<p>For example, for Northwestern:</p>
<p>Undergrad enrollment is 8153. 25% of that is 2038 students. 249 National Merit Scholars went there in Fall, 2007 so these 249 represent 12.2% of the average class size.</p>
<p>While it is interesting to compare numbers on NMS at different schools, it should not serve as an indicator of a school’s overall quality. The main reason I say this is because a number of schools on this list offer scholarships to NMS, while others do not. Schools that offer NMS scholarships tend to have a much higher percentage of NMS, all else being equal.</p>
<p>Arcadia: I think that the original poster (OP) addressed your concern in the initial list posted based on NMS who were not sponsored by the school attended. I somewhat disagree with the above post as the number of NMS on a campus can be an indication of academic quality at a particular institution. But CollegeHelp’s initial list was brilliant in a subtle sort of way, and was intended to be used as one factor in measuring academic quality at these schools. Also it is not clear as to how much scholarship money is given by a particular school to a NMS student.</p>
<p>arcadia,
There are approximately 14,000 National Merit Finalists and all of the colleges have the option to participate in the sponsorship of these students. Those colleges that chose to sponsor students certainly should not be penalized for making the effort to attract these top students. </p>
<p>Some colleges will use merit aid and scholarships such as NMS to attract those students; some colleges will not. But the bottom line is where do these top students end up and I certainly don’t think you penalize schools like Rice, Northwestern and others that clearly attracted a lot of very talented students with this program. </p>
<p>An analogy might be the free agent baseball player market where all of the major league teams can bid for a player’s services, but not all choose to. As a result, the star player has to decide where to sign and play. Teams that spend the money to attract the stars should be recognized for their efforts as ultimately this leads to a stronger team.</p>
<p>hawkette,</p>
<p>i think you should exclude those sponsored by schools. i like how including them makes my school look good but i’ve asked around before and i found that the fair way to compare is to exclude them. even if you disagree with me on this, can you generate a list excluding college sponsored NMS? thanks!</p>
<p>Sam Lee,
I had done this for a subset of the overall group (the USNWR Top 30 National Universities). Here are those results measured both by 1. Number of NMS Scholars only and 2. Number of NMS Scholars including sponsored students. </p>
<p>I also divided them into sub-groups where there seem to be natural breaks in the numbers:</p>
<p>Rank, , NMS Scholars , % of entering freshmen , College</p>
<p>1 , 285 , 17% , Harvard
2 , 36 , 17% , Caltech
3 , 179 , 15% , Princeton
4 , 183 , 14% , Yale
5 , 138 , 13% , MIT</p>
<p>6 , 164 , 10% , Stanford
7 , 64 , 8.4% , Rice
8 , 90 , 5.7% , Duke
9 , 80 , 5.3% , Brown
10 , 51 , 5.0% , Dartmouth
11 , 62 , 4.7% , Columbia
12 , 115 , 4.7% , U Penn</p>
<p>13 , 56 , 3.5% , Vanderbilt
14 , 40 , 3.3% , U Chicago
15 , 63 , 3.1% , Northwestern
16 , 50 , 2.7% , Wash U
17 , 46 , 2.2% , Notre Dame
18 , 40 , 2.3% , Georgetown
19 , 31 , 2.2% , Carnegie Mellon
20 , 24 , 2.1% , Johns Hopkins</p>
<p>21 , 47 , 1.4% , Cornell
22 , 16 , 1.3% , Tufts
23 , 20 , 1.2% , Emory
24 , 60 , 1.0% , UC Berkeley
25 , 38 , 1.0% , U Virginia
26 , 62 , 1.0% , U Michigan
27 , 36 , 0.9% , USC
28 , 39 , 0.9% , U North Carolina
29 , 6 , 0.6% , Wake Forest
30 , 28 , 0.4% , UCLA</p>
<p>Rank, , NMS Scholars including sponsored students , % of entering freshmen , College</p>
<p>1 , 159 , 20.9% , Rice
2 , 285 , 17.0% , Harvard
3 , 36 , 16.7% , Caltech
4 , 196 , 16.3% , U Chicago
5 , 179 , 15.0% , Princeton</p>
<p>6 , 183 , 13.7% , Yale
7 , 138 , 13.4% , MIT
8 , 249 , 12.2% , Northwestern
9 , 204 , 11.0% , Wash U
10 , 172 , 10.8% , Vanderbilt
11 , 164 , 10.2% , Stanford</p>
<p>12 , 90 , 5.7% , Duke
13 , 231 , 5.5% , USC
14 , 80 , 5.3% , Brown
15 , 51 , 5.0% , Dartmouth
16 , 62 , 4.7% , Columbia
17 , 115 , 4.7% , U Penn
18 , 59 , 4.7% , Tufts
19 , 166 , 3.9% , U North Carolina
20 , 60 , 3.6% , Emory</p>
<p>21 , 40 , 2.3% , Georgetown
22 , 46 , 2.2% , Notre Dame
23 , 31 , 2.2% , Carnegie Mellon
24 , 24 , 2.1% , Johns Hopkins
25 , 47 , 1.4% , Cornell
26 , 60 , 1.0% , UC Berkeley
27 , 38 , 1.0% , U Virginia
28 , 62 , 1.0% , U Michigan
29 , 10 , 0.9% , Wake Forest
30 , 28 , 0.4% , UCLA</p>
<p>thanks hawkette,</p>
<p>your list #1 is what i’d expect based on SAT average. generous merit-aid program of certain schools give them extra edge, but as a whole, it correlates with SAT average fairly well.</p>
<p>um, icy, the reason UT and some other schools have more NM students than other more “prestigious” schools is that in the first column, you see the number of NM scholars who won their $2500 through the National Merit corporation itself. Then in the third column you see the number of National Merit finalists who didn’t get the $2500 scholarship but were then awarded money from the school they decided to attend. If UT hadn’t given them money, they wouldn’t have been national merit scholars.</p>
<p>mochamaven,
I understand your point, but let’s not forget the pool of students that we are talking about. There are 14,000 National Merit finalists. I hope you will agree that the great majority of these are pretty strong candidates that any college would like to enroll. Ideally, I’d love to know where all 14,000 are, but since that is not available, the NMS data with and without the college-sponsored scholarships are the next best thing. All of these colleges have the option to sponsor students if they chose and I applaud those that do because this is rewarding more of these high achieving students for what they have done. Furthermore, these numbers don’t account for any other element of financial assistance (merit aid or otherwise) that likely varies from college to college. My conclusion is that the purist (who likely is part of the historical status quo) might like the NMS-declared winners only, but I think the efforts of the college-sponsoring schools to recruit these top students should be recognized as a net positive that improves their student body profile.</p>
<p>looking at hawkette’s first list again in post #27, it seems that the % correlates very well with the upper 75-percentile SAT rank. But there’s one exception: WashU.<br>
i wonder how WashU did last year. their NMS number this year doesn’t seem to match their posted SAT score range for last year. it’s possible that they just have a down year but i am also curious if they have been posting stats for admits instead of enrollees. It would be interesting to see if their range this year is consistent with the # of NMS they got.</p>
<p>For the 2005-06 year, Wash U had 241 total NMS students (13.1% of their enrolled class). Of these, 175 were school-sponsored and 66 were not. </p>
<p>Wash U’s numbers this year were 204 total (11% of enrolled class). Of these, 154 were school sponsored and 50 were not.</p>
<p>Remember that the numbers are skewed by the differences in regional PSAT cut-offs and the fact that the Northeast draws a huge number of boarding school students, who have the highest National Merit cut-offs in the country. I bet that Harvard, Yale and Princeton would all rank at the top if the ranking was based solely on PSAT scores higher than 220.</p>
<p>On several of the lists i’ve seen, </p>
<p>Texas A&M have been in the top on number of NM finalists enrolled.</p>
<p>yet i can find nothing on what they do for finalists. their website is confusing.</p>
<p>Texas A&M recruits NMF’s heavily. They put together very good scholarship packages, they invite NMF to visit them by paying a good portion of the travel cost. They allow them into their honors program with good benefits. From purely a financial standpoint they are very good to NMF’s</p>
<p>interesting. I would make a good guess that S, NMS, made, Zero affect on CMU’s SAT range or to the success of its students.</p>
<p>Okay, this is in reference to a post I think on the first page, but that poster mentioned that the reason there aren’t so many NMFs at Harvard is because there are many ACT students, which disqualifies them.
What’s an “ACT student”? I’m from the midwest, a bastion of the ACT, and I’m an NMF. I confused.</p>
<p>why is emory so low?</p>
<p>My son is an NMF and chose to go to Texas A&M not only because the university offered him a great deal of scholarship money (easily covering 80% or more of his costs), but also because it gave him leadership training opportunities and automatic admission into the business honors program. Other state schools probably offer similar advantages to NMFs. If my son had gone to an Ivy League school, he would have just been one of the pack. At a competitive state school, he is a stand-out who has a chance of getting leadership experience on campus while still getting an excellent education through the honors curriculum. Web sites usually don’t provide complete information for an NMF student. Students should contact an honors recruiter at every campus of interest and ask for more complete information about what NMFs are offered.</p>
<p>The University of Texas at Austin ranks second among universities and colleges enrolling the most National Merit Scholars. In the universitys 2007 entering class, there were 283 freshman Merit Scholars, second only to Harvard University where there were 285. </p>
<p>Texas waives nonresident tuition for out-of-state and foreign students who receive a scholarship of $1,000 a year. This waiver is designed to provide Texas universities with a recruitment incentive to attract top-ranked students. The number of students who may receive the waiver is capped at 5 percent of each institutions total enrollment. </p>
<p>The states two flagship institutions, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M, both offer out-of-state tuition waivers to National Merit Scholars.<br>
This is a great deal if you are accepted into UT Austins engineering or business schools, both ranked in the top ten in the nation. Texas residents receive $13,000 spread over 4 years if they are NMS winners at UT Austin and about this amount plus an additional $24,000 at Texas A&M. Top engineering students (generally those who qualify for the honors program) may apply for an additional competitive scholarship up to that amount at UT Austin as well.</p>