My daughter just found out that she will get an $18k Presidential Scholarship from Miami. I also expect that she will be a National Merit Finalist and according to Miami’s web-site receive $16k for this.
My question is if the National Merit Scholarship negates the Presidential Scholarship. The reason I ask is that on UM’s scholarship page (under National Merit Scholarship) it says “If a student in one of the categories above is admitted and receives a merit scholarship in an amount greater than $16,000, the higher scholarship amount will be the final scholarship amount.”
We called Financial Aid/Admissions and they said this situation (Presidential and National Merit) has never occurred, which I find hard to believe.
Thanks for any feedback.
When my child asked UM about this during a school visit last year, the UM rep said that they would NOT stack the National Merit and Presidential Scholarship awards together. In other words, you’d get the higher of the two but not both. Nothing was put in writing, however. We asked because it was a factor in which college my kid listed as #1 on NM application.
The $16k National Merit scholarship is fairly new at UM. In 2013 (and I believe 2014), UM offered just the $1000/year NM but it’s very likely that many National Merit finalists received Presidential scholarships equal to or greater than the $16k.
They will stack other merit scholarships (my son has Presidential plus 2 others) but only up to cost of tuition. His scholarships were greater than the cost of tuition for his freshman year so the amounts were adjusted - they couldn’t be used for other expenses such as room & board. So, after freshman year, even if you essentially got full tuition+ starting out, there will be a gap as tuition increases. That said, I don’t think the intent with the new National Merit scholarship is to be in addition to the Presidential so those aren’t stacked.
The $1k National Merit was not stacked and can be used for books, housing, etc.
Singer & Stamps scholarships works a bit different than what I’ve described.
@NEILRRM If I have a 25k presidential scholarship, and I receive either the Singer or Weeks Endowed scholarships that are worth 170k, would I only receive 70k more to make my original 100 up to the 170?
@syd0898 The Singer and Presidential scholarships are tuition-restricted so the most you can receive is equal to tuition i.e. you can’t stack the tuition-restricted scholarships and use any balance over tuition towards room & board, etc. If you were to receive a Singer, it would replace the Presidential. Using your example, the most you would receive is 170k.
I don’t know the details on the Weeks Endowed scholarship i.e. is it tuition-based or all expenses? If it is tuition only and you were to receive it, it would be stacked on the Presidential up to the cost of tuition. Since I don’t know the details of that scholarship, these are just guesses. So, if that scholarship was $12k/year, it would be stacked onto the $25k Presidential. You would receive $37k per year towards tuition. If the Weeks was $25k, the Presidential and/or Weeks would be adjusted so the maximum would be the cost of tuition for 2016-2017 (and will never be adjusted upwards).
The initial amounts of my S’s scholarships (3, including Presidential and a music one) were greater than tuition for 2013-2014 so the Presidential was adjusted down so as not to exceed tuition. That downward adjustment was not re-applied in future years as tuition increases. His $1k annual National Merit is not tuition-only so he can use that towards other school-expenses.