<p>Looking for merit scholarships for son who is a rising HS sophomore. Just realized that paying for college for daughter at LAC is going to use up the savings! Looking for a book that will describe in detail, the merit awards for different schools (can't get the specific info on college websites), as well as information about scholarships usable at different schools. Son looks like he will have top SAT scores and very good GPA.</p>
<p>Be sure he takes the PSAT for practice this year and see how he does; here is a lot of merit aid tied to becoming a National Merit Finalist. </p>
<p>My son will be starting college in fall where his NMF status put him in the running for a full-tution scholarship and that is what he was awarded. We only pay fees, room, board and books, making his private college much cheaper than our state flagship university which only offered him a token amount of merit aid. </p>
<p>As for resources, there is a thread here on CC called “Schools known for good merit aid” and I found that thread to be very helpful.</p>
<p>^^what PKM said 
My D is also a NMF and has a merit scholarship tied to that. However, the school she will be attending also gives significant merit aid to students with scores over a certain threshold. </p>
<p>One thing D & I did when looking for schools with good merit aid, was look at her test scores compared to the published 25-75% for accepted students at each school. If her scores fell in the >75% for a given school, then we felt she’d have a decent chance for merit aid. That seemed to be a good harbinger, but the NMF added to the equation too.</p>
<p>I don’t know of any books on the subject, but here are two threads that discuss strategies for locating merit scholarships:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/148852-what-ive-learned-about-full-ride-scholarships.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/148852-what-ive-learned-about-full-ride-scholarships.html</a>
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/291483-update-what-i-learned-about-free-ride-scholarships.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/291483-update-what-i-learned-about-free-ride-scholarships.html</a></p>
<p>Here is a thread where many automatic scholarships are listed:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/848226-important-links-automatic-guaranteed-merit-scholarships.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/848226-important-links-automatic-guaranteed-merit-scholarships.html</a></p>
<p>I’d love to hear of books as well! Another thread looks at data from colleges’ Common Data Sets to list percentages of merit aid given to nonneed students. It was started by someone else, but I’ve contributed to it because I found it to be one of the few lists of such information based on statistics:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/696637-merit-aid-percentage-common-data-set-4.html?highlight=merit[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/696637-merit-aid-percentage-common-data-set-4.html?highlight=merit</a></p>
<p>Within this thread, I’ve described how to compute this information for other colleges not on the list. If you do so, it would be great if you could add yours to the list!</p>