<p>
</p>
<p>Except for the guaranteed-if-you-put-us-down-as-first-choice NM scholarships, all those other merit awards are going to depend on your kid’s overall stats. You can get a pretty good feeling right now if your kid is going to be in contention for merit aid at any school, even without knowing about NM. You’d have to do that kind of school-by-school comparison even with the letters in hand, finding out about the stats for past winners of Vandy and Case merit money before you booked a plane ticket. </p>
<p>Big institutional non-NM awards are outside NM’s purview. It’s a bit unfair to blame NM because we can’t find out now if Case will have large non-NM merit awards next year. Case could make their own guaranteed NM award, or they could promote their merit aid and likely statistics on their website. </p>
<p>The good news is that you can do the legwork now and have time to go see the schools that do look like good non-NM merit bets this spring or over the summer.</p>