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Exactly Rob, that’s why Oklahoma and Alabama have so many sponsored National Merit Scholars. Most of their winners have parents who work at affiliated companies or got a full ride since they were NMFs.</p>
<p>Since D1 is on a full NMF ride at UA, I get that part about the full ride.</p>
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Yes, but it gives prospective students an idea of the caliber of the peer group they’ll be exposed to at the school.</p>
<p>UW-Madison has 17 National Merit winners while Harvard has 248. There’s going to be a huge difference in the quality of the education and collaboration among students that occurs at these places.</p>
<p>goldenboy, you’re forgetting an important part of the way that National Merit scholarships work. Some of the school-awarded scholarships are far more generous than the ones awarded by National Merit. Given a choice between, say, $15k per year directly from the school for 4 years versus a one-time $2500 check from National Merit, there would be no reason to take the lesser amount. </p>
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<p>Yes, but the footnote at the bottom of page 38 says “*An asterisk indicates that Merit Scholars whose scholarships are sponsored by the institution are included; the number sponsored by the college is shown in parentheses.” It looks like goldenboy has done the subtraction to remove the institute-sponsored scholarships from the list in the original post.</p>
<p>I am sort of confused reading this thread. My son (current junior) took the PSAT in October, scored 228. Already took the SAT in October, scored above 2300. If I understand this OP correctly, (and my son becomes a NMSF and later NMF), his chances of becoming a NM Scholar are 0 if he accepts one of the scholarships at a school that guarantees a scholarship for NMF students. Theoretically, we would need to be full pay at a school that doesn’t reward his achievement in order to get labeled as a scholar? I am okay without the “scholar” label. It is nice to see where past NMF, scholars, or whatever label applies ended up.</p>
<p>menloparkmom, I think you keep misunderstanding me. There’s no doubt all of those NM winners at Chicago are smart but it’s peer schools don’t sponsor the award so it would be disingenuous to compare Chicago’s total National Merit count with the non-sponsored merit number at other schools.</p>
<p>Like I said, students at Chicago and USC are equally considered for the main award regardless of whether they get sponsored merit money from their schools so it is a fair way to look at student body strength at schools.</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, UT-Austin enrolls more National Merit Scholars than any state school besides Berkeley. I really feel like Texas is very underrated for some reason.</p>
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No, let me clear up this confusing award for you.</p>
<p>If your school sponsors the NMS, then you can either win the money independently through NMSC or pick the cash award the school offers if it is more. Either way, your son will be recognized as a National Merit Scholarship since the National Merit Scholarship Corporation gave him that designation.</p>
<p>If your school doesn’t sponsor the NMS, then the only way you can win cash is to win one of the 1800 grand prize awards of $2500. So, all of Duke’s 93 winners and Harvard’s 248 winners were selected as part of the 1,800 National Merit Scholarship winners that NMSC decides upon annually.</p>
<p>It’s obviously much harder to win one of the 1,800 NMSC cash prizes than just be named a Scholar because your future university or father’s company sponsors it.</p>
<p>For instance, I was a National Merit Finalist in high school but didn’t end up winning one of the main 1,800 cash awards given through the NMSC so I didn’t get anything and wasn’t a National Merit Scholar since my school (Duke) didn’t sponsor it and my parents’ employers (health system) didn’t either.</p>
<p>If I attended Chicago or Oklahoma or if my dad would have worked at a partner company like UPS, then I would have been a “National Merit Scholar” as well but alas I wasn’t.</p>
<p>The Scholar designation isn’t a big deal really. Your son would get an extra $2,000 at U of Chicago if you were deciding between there and Penn or Duke or something.</p>
<p>Re: UT-Austin, they stopped sponsoring scholarships in 2010. So…UT enrolled only 47 Scholars in 2011. Contrast, in 2008, it enrolled 283 and was second only to Harvard at 285 (which did not make any institution-sponsored awards).</p>
<p>Goldenboy, </p>
<p>I take it you excluded college-sponsored National Merit Scholarships from your totals for each school. Which is fine, since School A could have a lot more “National Merit Scholars” (including college-sponsored awardees) than School B without having more “National Merit Finalists” than School B just by virtue of School A’s policy of giving a scholarship to every National Merit Finalist who enrolls. In short, the number of National Merit Scholars doesn’t necessarily indicate the quality of the student body, especially if you count college-sponsored awards. </p>
<p>So, for example, USC had 254 National Merit Scholars, of which 215 were National Merit Scholars by virtue of USC giving them a scholarship, leaving only 39 who got National Merit Scholarships either from the NMSC or from corporate sponsors. UCLA, meanwhile, had 34 National Merit Scholars, none of them sponsored by the university. But UCLA might easily have as many National Merit Finalists in its entering class as USC; this difference is that those Finalists at UCLA remained just Finalists, not Scholars, while similarly qualified students at USC were made Scholars by the institutional award.</p>
<p>But even after wringing that distortion out of the totals, you still can’t use National Merit Scholars as a proxy for quality of the student body, for several reasons. First, a large percentage of the National Merit Scholarships are corporate-sponsored; you need to either be a child of a corporate employee, or from a geographic area that the sponsor designates, or enrolling in a program that the sponsor favors in order to get the award. And you can’t assume that these corporate-sponsored awards are distributed evenly around the country. It could well be that more corporations in the Northeast sponsor National Merit Scholarships than in other regions; if so, then the numbers of Scholars would skew toward the Northeast—and in every region, most students tend to go to college pretty close to home. (Even the Ivies, as much as they strive for national representation in their student body, draw much more heavily from the Northeast than from other parts of the country; Princeton, for example, draws nearly half its class from the Boston-Washington corridor, states that represent about 18% of the nation’s population).</p>
<p>Second, it’s not a level playing field as to who qualifies to be a Finalist. Qualifying scores for Semifinalist vary pretty widely by state, from a low of 204 (Wyoming) to a high of 223 (Massachusetts, New Jersey). It could be that one reason Vanderbilt has so many more NMS than Emory is that the qualifying score in Georgia (218) is 4 points higher than in Tennessee (218). Or perhaps that factor is compounded by more corporate sponsors in Tennessee than in Georgia, so that some of the National Merit Scholars at Vandy might not have even qualified as Semifinalists in Georgia.</p>
<p>Then, third, the whole National Merit business is based on PSAT scores, but not everyone takes the PSAT. In some states, virtually everyone does; in other states only a fraction of the students take it. That could also produce a geographic skew. According the the NMSC, 1.5 million HS juniors took the PSAT. That’s almost exactly as many as take the SAT. But another 1.5 million or so take the ACT. There’s some overlap–students who take both the SAT and the ACT–but some states are clearly SAT-dominant and others are clearly ACT-dominant. My guess is that more people take the PSAT in SAT-dominant states. I’ve encountered some college-bound juniors here in Minnesota (an ACT-dominant state) who never heard of the PSAT, or didn’t realize, when it was offered as an optional test at their school, that it was the qualifying test for a national scholarship competition. Now I understand the NMSC allocates semifinalist slots to each state in proportion to the number of graduating HS seniors in the state. But they may be awarding those slots to a disproportionally small pool in some states (and in fact, this, more than the quality of the schools or the academic achievements and native intelligence of the students, may be why Semifinalist qualifying scores vary so much by state). And that may further skew the semifinalist pool from state to state.</p>
<p>In short, there are a whole bunch of reasons why the number of National Merit Scholars is a lousy proxy for student body quality. And once you realize that, it’s hard to see the point of your exercise.</p>
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<p>There are 2,500 NMSC awards, not 1,800.</p>
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<p>In this day and age, I shouldn’t have to point out that sometimes it’s the mother’s company that sponsors the award. :rolleyes: </p>
<p>You seem to be assuming that those who win a university or company sponsored award are in some way not as accomplished or deserving as those who won the NMSC awards. If the scholarship is guaranteed to the NMF based on their first-choice college or parental employer, and it’s more than $2500, then those students take the bigger payout. </p>
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<p>Agreed. The money (at whatever level) is nice. It’s nice bragging rights for the colleges, and it’s nice for high schools to be able to brag about how many NMFs they had in their senior class. The general public that is even aware of National Merit doesn’t really care about distinctions between NMSF, NMF and NMS, let alone who is writing any checks.</p>
<p>Its interesting to look at the Boston specific numbers:</p>
<p>Harvard 248
MIT 128
Northeastern 100
Tufts 79
BU 28
BC 19
Brandeis 14</p>
<p>Because the only good students are NM winners, is that what you are claiming? Are the other 1300 or so kids each H class just filler?</p>
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<p>This is incorrect. There are three ways to win cash (and be listed as a National Merit Scholar, rather than “just” a National Merit Finalist). For all three you need to be a NM Finalist. First, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation gives out 2,500 one-time awards of $2,500 (Annual Report p. 8). Second, some colleges and universities give merit awards to National Merit Finalists who elect to enroll at their school; in 2011, 193 colleges and universities gave out 4,772 such awards, consisting of annually renewable stipends of $500 to $2,000 per year (Annual Report p. 8). Third, some corporations sponsor their own National Merit Scholarships. In 2011, 240 “corporations, corporate foundations, and other business organizations” sponsored 1,058 National Merit Scholarships to National Merit Finalists who met other criteria designated by the sponsor. In most cases, these awards went to “Finalists . . . who are children of the grantor organization’s employees or members,” but “[s]ome awards are designated for Finalists who reside in communities designated by the sponsor, and a few are provided for Finalists who are planning college majors or careers the sponsor wishes to encourage.” (Annual Report p. 9).</p>
<p>The NMSC counts all three categories as “National Merit Scholarships,” and lists the award winners as “National Merit Scholars.” National Merit Finalists who don’t get any of these awards remain National Merit Finalists.</p>
<p>It is almost certainly NOT the case that “all of Duke’s 93 winners and Harvard’s 248 winners were selected as part of the 1,800 National Merit Scholarship winners that NMSC decides upon annually.” In the first place, the NMSC gives out 2,500 such awards, not 1,800. And second, it is almost certainly the case that some significant but undertermined (and indeterminable from the NMSC Annual Report) fraction of the 93 National Merit Scholars listed for Duke and the 248 listed for Harvard are recipients of the 1,058 corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarships awarded in 2011 to sons and daughter of employees, residents of particular locales, and/or students intending to pursue sponsor-favored fields of study.</p>
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<p>More accurately, it gives you an idea of where the best PSAT test takers end up.</p>
<p>There is certainly some informational asymmetry involved and that’s why the schools with the wealthiest student bodies i.e. the Ivies and other top schools have so many National Merit Scholars. Once you get past the socioeconomic discrepancy, the rest of your post is complete baloney.</p>
<p>Nearly all of the USNWR top 30 schools from Harvard/Princeton to Michigan/Tufts have national reputations and compete for the strongest students in the country. Despite Princeton being in NJ, it still has a whopping 150+ National Merit Scholars placing it right after Harvard and Yale. New Jersey’s National Merit cutoff is north of 220+ each year and this doesn’t stop Princeton from enrolling a lot of these students even if they come from states where the NMSF cutoff is high (MA, NY, NJ, CT).</p>
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I completely disagree with this. You can’t fault Princeton’s student body for skewing to the Northeast since the majority of the smartest students in the country are from the New England to DC corridor. However, notice how California is the second most represented state in Princeton’s student body after New Jersey.</p>
<p>At any rate, some schools are a lot more geographically diverse than Princeton and the Ivies. Duke and Notre Dame are prime examples. Duke’s 5 most represented states in it’s undergraduate student body are California, North Carolina, New York, Florida and Texas in that order. It really doesn’t get more diverse than that. Like I said though, the most ambitious students in the country are located in California and along the East Coast which is why schools like Vandy and Duke are filled with residents from these states.</p>
<p>At any rate, there’s no evidence to suggest that the companies that provide funding to the NMSC reside primarily in the NE. The burden of proof is on you now to demonstrate this.</p>
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Oh come on, you’re really reaching at this point. Vanderbilt and Emory are geographically diverse enough where that small difference in the cutoff scores in their home states wouldn’t really affect their National Merit count. As far as your second point, that’s absolutely ridiculous since Atlanta is located in GA and the city has more Fortune 500 companies and large corporations than almost every other mid-sized Southern city combined. Intuitively, there’s no way that Tennesssee has more sponsoring companies than Georgia.</p>
<p>Even if what you said had any merit, the difference in the number of National Merit winners that Vandy has and what Emory has is too significant (65 vs. 10) to dismiss based on a minuscule difference in cutoff scores and a hypothetical differential in the preponderance of companies in their host states.</p>
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However, the cutoff score in each state takes account of the fact of how many students take the PSAT so I’m not sure I understand your point. If you are in the upper 99th percentile of all PSAT test takers in your state, you will become an NSF regardless of how many students took that test in any given test. Minnesota students don’t have to score nearly as well to earn a shot at becoming a National Merit Scholar as California students do which is partly why Minny has almost as many NMS winners as UCLA (34 vs. 27) or why Oklahoma has the same number as U of Michigan-Ann Arbor.</p>
<p>That’s why I excluded the non top 30 schools to eliminate geographic bias. I’m trying to be as fair as possible to the top schools because I think almost everyone on this forum agrees that Michigan is better than Minnesota and UNC-Chapel Hill is better than U of Oklahoma.</p>
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I think you were trying to produce a pigeon out of thin air. There’s a reason why the National Merit Scholarship winner matriculation list correlates with the SAT averages per school so well besides a few minor exceptions: it is a trusted source as it is derived from the results of a national competitions where the results are standardized and are reported fairly by a credible organization.</p>
<p>If you’re going to dismiss this study as a poor proxy of student quality, we might as well put all American universities on a dart board and fire away since there’s no difference between Harvard and Wayne State University.</p>
<p>Skepticism with no moderation can be blinding.</p>
<p>Odyssey04 and others may be confused by this thread because goldenboy has made several errors. There is enough confusion about NM awards without adding to it.</p>
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<p>This statement is so confusing that it is hard to refute. I will try to address what I think might be odyssey04’s concern:</p>
<p>If a college offers a non-NM scholarship for which the requirement is NMSF status, administered by the college rather than NM (such as Alabama’s full tuition and housing scholarship), a student can also receive an official NM scholarship. Accepting an official NM scholarship does not require the recipient to turn down the entire non-NM scholarship, although the non-NM scholarship might be reduced. </p>
<p>If I remember correctly, mom2collegekids’s child received an official NM corporate-sponsored scholarship plus Alabama’s tuition and housing scholarship (I don’t know whether the latter was reduced as a result). My D received a $2500 NM scholarship this year, so she will not receive UNC CH’s $1000/year scholarship for NMSFs, but she will receive it the remaining 3 years of college. </p>
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<p>In fact, if your college doesn’t sponsor an official NM scholarship, you can win an official NM scholarship by winning a $2500 award or a corporate-sponsored award. You can also receive a non-official-NM scholarship for which the requirement is NMSF or NMF status. It is still a scholarship. It is just not an official NM scholarship.</p>
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<p>This is not necessarily true. NM corporate-sponsored scholarships are not necessarily given to every child of an employee who is an NMF. Companies can limit the number of scholarships they sponsor. Also, one’s parent doesn’t necessarily have to work for a company is a NM sponsor in order to receive a NM corporate-sponsored scholarship. I received a NM corporate-sponsored scholarship when I was a NMF years ago, and my family had no affiliation with the company (my father was self-employed and my mother was a teacher.)</p>
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<p>No, UT-Austin had 47 Merit Scholar awardees last year. UNC Chapel Hill had 149. Of those, 117 were recipients of official NM scholarships sponsored by the college. It is not valid to subtract the 117 from the 149 as the OP did, as they are all NM Scholars. </p>
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<p>There is no main award. NM scholarship recipients are all NM Scholars whether they received a corporate-sponsored scholarship, a $2500 one-time scholarship or a college-sponsored scholarship. </p>
<p>Remember that a student my receive only one official NM scholarship. At some colleges, a student who receives a $2500 scholarship will receive what would otherwise be a $1000/year college-sponsored the following three years, but it will not be an official NM scholarship. (In my D’s example, above, she will receive a total of $5500 by virtue of being an NMF, but only the $2500 scholarship her freshman year is an official NM scholarship). </p>
<p>At other colleges, a student who receives the $2500 scholarship would not be eligible for a $1000/year college-sponsored scholarship because the college does not convert the remaining 3 years’ worth into an unofficial scholarship. (The existence of such policies is the cause of so much concern about which college to name as a first choice college–there are many other posts on CC about this, some of which were written by me). As a result, those NMFs choose to receive $4000 rather than $2500. That choice makes logical sense. It doesn’t mean the student is any less of a scholar or the school is any less strong. Therefore, subtracting students who receive college-sponsored scholarships from the total number of NMSs on the NM report makes no sense.</p>
<p>I have no more time to refute the OP’s mistakes. I spent this much time on it only because I am so grateful for the help I was given on CC when I went through this process.</p>
<p>This took so long to write that I cross-posted with several people. I think I agree with everything SlitheyTove and bclintock wrote; both are well-informed. Odyssey04, feel free to PM me if you’d like.</p>
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<p>The National Merit Scholarship foundation selects the strongest 2500 candidates out of their finalists. Many people don’t even know that there is anything above finalist, or believe that finalist and scholarship winner are the same. As far as I know, people who are vying for company scholarships are not excluded from this contest, but I’m not sure about this. And I know for a fact people who accept scholarship money from a university because they are a finalist are not excluded, because the National Merit Scholar awards are given before the college choice. </p>
<p>The point is that, yes, the National Merit Scholarship that the NMS foundation gives out is more exclusive than the awards that universities give to finalists, even if they themselves call all 8000 people “National Merit Scholars.”</p>
<p>A big part of the confusion is the wording used by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation.</p>
<p>This is how I understand it. Imagine instead of academics, this was an athletic competion.</p>
<p>Everyone who made the finals of an olympic event would be designated a olympic finalist (say 10,000 people.) In the finals competition at the olympics, there would be one gold medal winner per olympics (2,500 people).</p>
<p>Now let’s say that all the people who made the finals of the olympics got endorsement contracts and that they were paid with a medal made of gold. Some people chose to accept these contracts while others did not seek them out. (say 1,000.)</p>
<p>Additionally, imagine that some of the people got university athletic scholarships. Instead of waiving their tuition, they were paid a medal made of gold to defray costs of tuition. (say 8,000 people, including some in the first two groups.) Some schools, like ivies, do not give athletic scholarships.</p>
<p>Now technically, you could say that all three groups of people are “gold medal-winning olympians,” but obviously the first group is more exclusive.</p>
<p>OP- You make tend to make assumptions about NMS that are simply not true. There are many students who may turn down what you think are the more “prestigious” NM corp. $2500 one time payment for their much higher NMS school or corporate money offers. Why would you take $2500 when you could accept a $1000 or $2000 per year renewable NMF sponsored college scholarship? Why anyone would consider these students to be a lower NMS is beyond me !</p>