I have been traveling and am at State Science Fair with my kids, so I haven’t been able to respond to this thread yet. I thought both @Lycurgus10 and @itsgettingreal17 were making good points and didn’t see them as contradictory, so I hope my post about making a decision on pursuing the Eminence opportunity won’t cause negative vibes on this site. It was not intended to do so.
For us, there are multiple ethical considerations to this whole process, ranging from the one Lycurgus raised to the one I was implying e.g. these “weekends” for interviews for scholarships themselves cost money, in our case a lot of money equal to our mortgage and all utilities for a month, or over three months of food for a family of four, so we have to decide to spend money we don’t have on a “chance” of a scholarship or give up the chance. I agree with itsgettingreal17 that students clearly have a right to pursue multiple scholarship options ethically- after all, my child has been a finalist for five of these opportunities so far and only has two received (one is our instate school and does not involve displacing other applicants, it is an odd, in-state only opportunity) so with four OOS finalist interviews/weekends, we have only 1 offer and the 4th would be OSU if we decided to go forward.
I also agree with lycurgus10 that if we were to have decided for sure that the UGA would be offered in place of OSU, it could be unethical (in addition to a financial hardship!) to go out and take up everyone’s time trying to get one of the awards. We do know from experience that you can easily end up with nothing after such a weekend (like after the Wells for us) But I wrote the post partly to determine whether we HAVE in fact decided that UGA would be accepted above OSU. Both have the intended majors and good points, which is what this thread originally was discussing. I was trying to find some additional details to be able to make an decision about moving forward or not based on the very question about whether we “need” to interview and try for an additional state-school opportunity at this point.
I do think it is absolutely ethical to pursue multiple options before you have decided which one to take. We cannot visit many colleges before the interview weekends to “vet” them earlier in the process because, as I mentioned, this costs money and the colleges don’t pay for it. In our case it also takes a long time (days each way) so since we cannot consider most of these colleges without significant merit aid, we first visit them if my child makes the final cut. But if we ruled out OSU (which I think we are close to doing) then we would feel bad, even if we could afford the time and money, going and wasting everyone’s time interviewing.
I don’t think there is as much disagreement here as the last few posts might indicate. That having been said, from our experiences so far at the top merit interviews/weekends, the colleges either choose alternates or choose a much larger number with the assumption that many kids won’t take the award. ( In the case of the FF, they must be expecting about 30% to decline given the numbers this year- that is one data point.) I think that is typical, different programs/colleges have different ranges that decline based on their experiences with yield in the past. At every event we have attended, the officials have been clear that the know most of the finalists will have many other merit and other options they might take instead (think Ivies) that is why they work so hard “selling” the school at these merit interview weekends. So I think itsgettingreal17 is reflecting the understanding of the colleges pretty well.
But all that is tangential to our deciding for our family if the expense of going to the weekend is worth the chance that my child will prefer OSU to UGA, should she win the Eminence which is NOT probable given the statistics and our track record so far.) If we know it won’t rank about UGA, it would not be worth it, and perhaps unethical, to proceed. If we are not sure until we actually go and hear the presentations, it would be ethical and perhaps worth it. (Perhaps not!)
Sorry this is long. I just don’t like to see discord on this site which is usually really supportive and helpful.
PS- We have to decide on OSU visit by Friday!
On that note, I don’t believe that there is a perfect college for a student. The truth is that there are many good fits, and it’s not the school that makes the student. It’s what the student does at the school she chooses to attend.