<p>I know there will only be 15000 students who become finalists which is less than top 1% of the graduating class in the country. Is it safe to say that most of these kids, assuming they have good GPA, EC, etc, should have no problem getting into the Ivys or at least top 10 or 15 schools based on News weeks ranking?</p>
<p>Does this make sense???</p>
<p>Absolutely not. The very top schools don’t care about NMF status. They have way too many NMFs and other high scorers to choose from.
If you want to find which ones do care, check which schools will give you scholarship money for being NMF.</p>
<p>All by itself, no. For starters, the cut-off differs by state. Many students from high-scoring states will not be NMSF but will be excellent candidates for highly selective schools nonetheless.</p>
<p>There is a lot of competition out there. NM status is the least of it.</p>
<p>Personally I think NMSF and NMF status is extremely overrated. All it says about a student is that he or she performed well on one morning’s administration of one standardized test. Furthermore there seems to be a fairly low bar to go from NMSF to NMF, since a large percentage of students do advance. It is a good thing that most top colleges pay very little attention to that designation. </p>
<p>While we’re on this topic, AP Scholar with honor/distinction, etc adds no further information about a student that is not already conveyed by the list of AP exams taken and their scores.</p>
<p>All these awards are nice to encourage students and make family members happy. The NMF status can at least provide some money, so it can yield concrete benefits that way. But for admission to top colleges, it is a side issue.</p>
<p>There are many students among the 16,000 semifinalists or the 15,000 finalists who applied to multiple Ivy League schools and don’t get into any of them. (The finalists all have good GPA’s.) </p>
<p>As parents have been saying, the higher level the school, the less they care about that one Saturday during the fall of your junior year when you did well on the PSAT. On the other hand, there are plenty of schools that would LOVE to get more NMFs, schools that are not too hard to get into and have many great programs - and some of these are quite generous with merit aid. Those schools really let you leverage your NMF status.</p>
<p>Edited: vicarious parent and I were typing at the same time and said nearly the same thing - Great minds think alike. 
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<p>I agree - in order to leverage your NMF’s status for admission or scholarships, you have to be willing to go to a school where they are actively seeking to improve the academic profile of their students - a fine option, I think! However, that status really won’t provide any advantages, either financially or in terms of admissions, at top 10 schools where it doesn’t improve the academic profile of their student body.</p>
<p>NMFs are a dime a dozen at top schools. A NMF could be a student with a 203 in one state, but a student with a 219 in another state misses the cutoff and is Commended.</p>
<p>Most top schools don’t even sponsor NMF awards. The only way you’d get NMF money at Harvard is if you are selected as one fo the National Merit Corporation’s 2,500 one-time $2500 award winners, or if a parent works at a company that offeres Corporate-sponsored NMF scholarships. </p>
<p>There are other CC threads that discuss schools which offer NMF packages (or at least sweeten the deal), but NMF is not a golden ticket to a tippy top school.</p>
<p>To the OP: Ha ha ha ha ha, no.</p>
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<p>Actually, to become a finalist you have to show a strong GPA for ALL grades 9-12 AND take the SAT and identify the NMS as a recipient of the score.</p>
<p>You had the premise in your initial post that all or most of the NMSF / NMF were even interested in Ivys and other top schools. Why would you make such an assumption? There are plenty of smart, able, capable students with excellent test scores who just don’t have those schools on their radar screen, and who desire to go to their state flagship or similar.</p>
<p>I’ll add that many National Merit Finalists do in fact wind up getting accepted at top-10 or -15 USNWR colleges. Maybe even a majority of the ones who apply to them (not all of them do). But it’s not because they were NMFs as much as because a high percentage of the kids who do well on that one Saturday morning in the fall of their junior years tend to do well on other Saturday mornings, too, and on the rest of the days of the week as well.</p>
<p>Right. Being a NMF is likely well correlated with those other factors (other good test scores, good grades, involvement in school, etc.) in the first place.</p>
<p>I think I read that Harvard, Yale, etc, have more NMFs than any other non-ivy school. But, being NMF was not what got them accepted. Being an NMF is not a hook for ivies.</p>
<p>Among applicants to the top 20 or so universities, being an NMF is a fairly ordinary credential. Plenty of students with that credential will get plenty of rejections.</p>
<p>In my daughter’s year, there were 35 NMFs at her high school. I think a total of 5 of them ended up at the very top schools (Yale, Princeton, and Stanford – nobody got into Harvard or MIT that year).</p>
<p>I think people need to seriously disabuse kids of the notion the NMSF/NMF will write their ticket for them. These days, most kids are aware of that, but I think NMSFs are still courted radically by a lot of schools which most likely wonÂ’t admit the majority of them. When I was in high school (1970s) I was one of three at my school and I got so much pleading and fawning mail I thought I could get in anywhere I wanted with 50 neurons tied behind my back. I donÂ’t remember it being as common back then for every kid going to college to get tons of mail, at least none of my friends talked about getting mail from colleges. So I really thought I had it made. I was sadly mistaken. Fortunately, these days I think most decent GCs are fairly well informed about the admissions process as they are now, and what it really takes to get into a top school. However, if a kid goes to a school without many NMSFs they may not know any better. Of course there is CC.</p>
<p>The most useful part about getting NMSF is the opportunity to let a couple of colleges know (or think) that they are your top choice colleges. </p>
<p>This is yet another way to demonstrate interest (which is of course, not relevant for the most competitive colleges).</p>
<p>Pages 18 & 19 of the NMS student guide list the colleges and # of scholarships offered.</p>
<p><a href=“http://nationalmerit.org/student_guide.pdf[/url]”>http://nationalmerit.org/student_guide.pdf</a></p>
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<p>Absolutely a great deal for someone who would like to be the big fish in a smaller pond. I just heard the story of a young man who took what University of Tulsa was offering to NMFs and has been treated royally (academically and financially). </p>
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<p>NMSF doesn’t give applicant to the top 10 schools any substantial leg up in the process.</p>
<p>Put a different way, not one of the kids admitted to ivies/top 10 schools from my daughter’s graduating class last year were NOT semi-finalists.</p>
<p>Bill Gates was a National Merit Scholarship winner!</p>