<p>To all of you out there who may have a child in contention to be named a National Merit/Hispanic/Achievement Scholar, be advised that the Univ of Texas at Austin ,for the high school graduating class of 2010, will no longer be offering any type of National Merit $. In the past, if you were a TX resident, you were guaranteed $4k the first year, and $3K each year after that....now you are out of luck. It is not yet posted on their website, but it was confirmed by my child's admissions counselor. We are in-state, so I didn't ask, but I would assume this would mean no tuition waiver for out-of-state as well.</p>
<p>The tuition waiver for out-of-state students still exists for any student who receives a scholarship of $1000 or more, as I believe is mandated by state law.</p>
<p>However, as there is no longer any guaranteed scholarship for National Merit for out-of-state students, their odds of receiving a waiver are considerably less.</p>
<p>Since the economy is causing more students to choose public universities, I bet that more public colleges will be dropping their merit aid for National Merit Scholars. It’s likely the scholars will head to public universities with or without the merit aid inducement.</p>
<p>University of Florida reduced their scholarship from $5.5k/ year to $1k/year two years ago. At the time they didn’t blame the economy, they just said that the next tier of students that didn’t get the NM scholarship did just as well academically so there was no reason to spend that money to get “better” students. They used to be one of the top schools recruiting NMFs. I don’t know how it is today.</p>