<p>Since the standards are higher in some states than others it’s really not “National” Merit at all, it’s state by state merit.</p>
<p>I agree, TatinG— the “National” should be taken out of the title</p>
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<p>LOL! What an outrageous and preposterous claim. What’s your evidence for this? </p>
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<p>I was using “skew to the northeast” only as a hypothetical example. But just for fun, let’s look at the corporations that provided the largest number of corporate-sponsored NMS and see where they’re from:</p>
<p>Corporation / # of NMS / headquarters</p>
<p>The Boeing Company / 63 / Chicago & Seattle
Lockheed Martin Foundation / 36 / Maryland (suburban DC)
Northrop Grumman / 32 / Virginia (suburban DC)
Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation / 25 / New York & NJ
BP Foundation / 25 / London (UK)-Houston
Honeywell / 25 / New Jersey
Siemens Foundation / 24 / Munich (Germany) & New York & DC
Texas Instruments / 23 / Dallas
Motorola Solutions Foundation 22 / Chicago
Pfizer / 22 / New York-New Jersey
Chevron U.S.A. Inc / 19 / California
PPG Industries Found. / 19 / Pittsburgh
Science Applications Int’l Corp. / 18 / Virginia (suburban DC)
Computer Sciences Corp. / 16 / Virginia (suburban DC)
Novartis / 16 / Basel (Switzerland) & New Jersey & Massachusetts & California
Dow Chemical Co. / 15 / Michigan
Rockwell Collins Charitable Corp. / 14 / Iowa
State Farm Companies Found. / 14 / Illinois
3M Company / 14 / Minnesota
BASF / 13 / Germany & New Jersey
General Dynamics / 13 / Virginia (suburban DC)
Battelle / 11 / Ohio
Mead Witter Foundation / 10 / Wisconsin
Textron Charitable Trust / 10 / Rhode Island</p>
<p>These 24 companies alone account for a total of 480, or almost half, of the corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarships. Of the 24, 13 have their headquarters and/or major operations in the Northeast (269 scholarships), 8 in the Midwest (including 3 in Illinois) (163 scholarships), 2 in California (35 scholarships), 2 in Texas (48 scholarships), 1 in the Pacific Northwest (63 scholarships) (some counted twice). The Midwest total is a bit inflated because it includes Boeings 63, based on Boeings headquarters being in Chicago; but the vast majority of those scholarships probably go to Washington State where Boeing was historically headquartered and still has the bulk of its employees.</p>
<p>Big winners among metro areas: DC (139), NY-NJ (125), Chicago (99, but remember 63 of those are probably mostly Seattle’s)</p>
<p>So yeah, Id say theres a major regional skew toward the Northeast here, and more generally toward a handful of areas where some particularly generous (in this regard) corporations are. My guess is it would play out similarly if you added in all the smaller corporate programs as well, but I dont have time for such tedium.</p>
<p>Bottom line, it’s simply not a uniform national competition. Especially when you consider that nearly a third of the non-school-sponsored National Merit Scholarships are of this corporate-sponsored kind. That makes National Merit Scholarships pretty much junk data as a proxy for student body strength.</p>
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<p>collegealum, some errors in this.</p>
<p>National Merit Finalists are eligible for one “official” NM scholarship. So let’s take a hypothetical NMF who decides that their absolute first choice school is Alabama, bar none. Alabama offers an exceptionally generous guaranteed scholarship to NMFs who specify to NMF that Alabama is their first choice school. Once the student tells NMF that Alabama is their number 1 choice, if Alabama admits them, then Alabama will immediately offer the student the Alabama-sponsored NM scholarship. At that point, that student is finished with the NM process. NM and Alabama consider them an NM Scholar. For purposes of this discussion, the student is now ineligible for NMSC’s $2500 award. Not that they care, because they’ve got a free ride. </p>
<p>Now let’s consider another hypothetical NMF whose first choice is American University. American used to guarantee that it would offer NMFs who specified AU as their #1 choice a hefty scholarship. Now they just say that they’ll consider it. 
My suspicion is that this works out very nicely for AU: they can now give any NMFs a big merit award while still keeping them eligible for the NMSC money, since AU’s scholarships are no longer guaranteed “National Merit Scholar” awards. </p>
<p>Finally, a non-hypothetical case. 
An NMF applies ED to Tufts, is accepted, so specifies Tufts as the first choice school on the NM form. Tufts does not (officially, at least) offer a guaranteed NM scholarship to NMFs. The student is not awarded one of the NMSC awards…but shortly thereafter receives a letter from Tufts saying congratulations, Tufts is awarding you a $2k NM scholarship. </p>
<p>What all this tells me is that a variety of different organizations and institutions can find interesting and creative ways to utilize the NM brand. Personally, I think it’s great that thousands of students manage to get substantial scholarships by pursuing NM awards. I also think that pretty much all of those 16,000 semi-finalists are going to do just fine in college. And I took great pleasure in noting in great big bolded text on D1’s high school profile that 40% of her senior year class was NMFs, because that’s the kind of shorthand stat that makes school boards decide that it would be a Bad Idea to eliminate that particular school. 
But using NMF or NMS or whatever as a proxy for anything else…well, be my guest, but it’s not what I’d use to evaluate college programs.</p>
<p>Rather than your personal definition of small and large class size, when it doesn’t fit your expectations (TONS of inconsistency), why not spend a few minutes adjusting for actual student size, given you care so much?</p>
<p>DD is a NMS with a corporate award. The corporate awards are selected before the NM Corporation $2500 awards. My daughter’s score was slightly higher than her $2500 winning classmate’s score, so you really cannot assume that the corporate awards go to kids with lower scores or qualifications, just to kids who are lucky enough to have a link to a corporation that participates.</p>
<p>I wish we could know the number of NM finalists, or semifinalists instead of just those who actually got money. That would be more revealing. Son didn’t need the money (unlike me) and so didn’t rank the school he attended as number one- better to let someone else get the money. I’ll likewise never know if I could have had my U’s money instead of a one time corporate one (in my day we had to choose in fall and I wanted to go away…). Numbers do count more than percentages also.</p>
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<p>Thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t sure about the timeline of the corporate award.</p>
<p>This thread confused me and I have a pretty good idea of how it works!</p>
<p>^^Well, I won one, and I’m confused too…</p>
<p>I think the National Merit Corporation could do a better job with branding.</p>
<p>And college awards are selected before the NM corporation awards, except when they aren’t. 
Sorry, that part is just inherently confusing! Anyone with a potential NMSF kid has to spend a year swotting up on the strategies of how to optimize the chances for some NM $$$. No smiley, because it’s no joke.</p>
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<p>Perhaps some story about Great Neck schools! Fwiw, Clinton, it’s a waste of time trying to correct the conclusions pushed by the OP. Not only is his claim preposterous, but the entire interpretation of the NMS numbers is. </p>
<p>You are better off perusing this thread and rolling your eyes with a smirk. Helps keeping your sanity.</p>
<p>Love xiggi’s last line. Some of my nonNMS friends did better in college than we did in the same major (eg grades-PBK)- some with/without the Honors degree.</p>
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<p>You really need to learn to be more careful in reading data. Minnesota has 37 non-school-sponsored National Merit Scholars (166 Merit Scholars - 129 school-sponsored = 37 school-sponsored National Merit Scholars). So Minnesota actually has more than UCLA (34). Not that it means anything.</p>
<p>But now you’re contradicting yourself. You started out claiming that the number of non-school-sponsored National Merit Scholars tells us how strong a school is because it’s a single national competition and only the best of the best win. Now you seem to be saying it’s a series of state-by-state contests so you get the same proportion in each state, even if the qualifying pool in one state might have significantly stronger test scores than those in another state. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways.</p>
<p>Yes, I know “the cutoff score in each state takes account of the fact of how many people take the PSAT.” That’s just my point–but it doesn’t work the way you think it works (read the NMSC Annual Report). Suppose in state A 100% of the HS juniors take the PSAT. The 1% who make National Merit Semifinalist will be, presumably, the top 1% of JS juniors in the state (or the top 1% of standardized test-takers, or the top 1% of PSAT-takers because some do better on the ACT, or the top 1% of PSAT-takers on that particular day). </p>
<p>Now suppose in state B only 50% of the HS juniors take the PSAT. NMSC says it chooses as Semifinalists the top PSAT-takers in each state. But the number of Semifinalists it names from each state doesn’t reflect the top 1% of PSAT-takers; it reflects a number equal to 1% of the HS juniors in that state, whether they took the PSAT or not. In order to get that many from the state where only half the HS juniors took the PSAT, NMSC will need to reach deeper into the PSAT score pool; so it may need to take the top 2% of PSAT-takers in State B to achieve the targeted number of Semifinalists for that state, whereas in state A, where 100% of the HS juniors took the test, it only needs to name the top 1% of PSAT-takers.</p>
<p>You seem to get confused by hypotheticals, so let’s look at some real numbers here. New Jersey and Michigan are similar in population, Michigan a bit bigger at 9.8 million, New Jersey 8.8 million; Michigan with about 1.65 million kids in K-12 education, New Jersey about 1.4 million. Yet roughly twice as many New Jersey HS juniors took the PSAT (67,888) as Michigan HS juniors (32,889). (Figures are from NMSC Annual Report, p. 7). So here we have a case where probably close to 100% of the HS juniors in New Jersey are taking the test, while somewhere around half of those in Michigan are taking it. Yet look how many National Merit Semifinalists were named: 556 in New Jersey, 570 in Michigan, in each case representing 1% of the total number of HS juniors in the state–NOT the top 1% of PSAT takers. In Michigan, the 570 Semifinalists represented the top 1.73% of PSAT-takers, while in New Jersey the 556 Semifinalists represented the top 0.82% of PSAT-takers. To get its targeted number of Semifinalists in Michigan, NMSC needed to dig deeper into the PSAT pool, setting the Semifinalist cutoff for Michigan at 209, while in New Jersey it was 221. I know people in high-cutoff states like to boast that this shows how smart their kids are and how competitive their schools are, but as this example illustrates, most of the difference is just a simple mathematical artifact: if NMSC chose the top 1% of PSAT-takers in each state, Michigan’s cutoff would be significantly higher; or if 100% of the Michigan HS juniors took the PSAT, Michigan’s Semifinalist cutoff would be much higher, probably pretty similar to New Jersey’s. But since only half of those eligible in Michigan take the PSAT, NMSC needs to use a lower cutoff to generate the number of Semifinalists equal to 1% of the HS juniors in the state, in this case a cutoff representing almost the top 2% of PSAT-takers. In short, NMSC is going twice as deep into the pool to name Semifinalists in Michigan—not because Michigan kids are dumber or worse test-takers, but because only half of them are taking the test and entering the competition.</p>
<p>But that means when it comes to the final round of competition and NMSC is naming the best of the best National Merit Scholars, the pool of finalists from New Jersey is going to be much stronger—again, not because New Jersey kids are inherently smarter, but because they were chosen from a much larger pool (twice the size) applying more stringent criteria. Or, to put it differently, roughly half of the HS juniors in Michigan aren’t even playing this game, which probably means somewhere around half of the very best Michigan students (or best test-takers, etc) just aren’t even in the competition. Or, to put it differently yet again, if you’ve got 100% of your students entering the competition, you should do about twice as well as a similar-sized state that has only 50% of its students in that particular competition. And that’s going to mean a heavy skew of the competition toward the states where PSAT participation rates are highest.</p>
<p>Clear?</p>
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<p>Yes, thank you for that sound advice, xiggi. Having watsed too much of my day on this, I think I’ll now take you up on it.</p>
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<p>Generally, the people who win the $2500 from the National Merit Corporation probably cleared the PSAT cut-off for any state. This is not to say that they consider these scores that highly in the finalist to winner cut, but there is probably at least a somewhat good correlation between being on the high end of the PSAT and the academic achievements which would help you win the actual scholarship.</p>
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<p>Hm…I don’t think this is quite right. I know some people who were listed in the paper as winning the National Merit Scholarship from the corporation (e.g., the one that gives out the $2500 award,) and some ended up at state schools and/or schools which gave large sums of money to National Merit Finalists (e.g., Rice.) In other words, they were given the honor in spite of the fact that the school they were going to gave their own scholarship money. I’d bet they didn’t get the extra $2500 because of their university award, but they were listed in the paper as winning the National Merit Scholarship from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. I’m sure there was no mistake, because the number of “scholars” would have been a lot more in the paper had they listed every finalist who got money from their college.</p>
<p>Also, from personal experience, everyone has to list a destination college. They told me it didn’t matter what I picked, so I picked one that gave merit money. They still gave me the award from the corporation, meaning that they don’t automatically take your name out of the running if you put down a college that gives merit money. This, of course, was in the 90’s so I don’t know if the process has changed.</p>
<p>Also, I don’t remember the exact timeline, but I’m pretty sure I hadn’t decided where I was going to school when I got notified that I won.</p>
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<p>What makes it confusing is that not all the merit award that colleges give to National Merit Finalists are considered National Merit Scholarships by NMSC or by the college itself. I was surprised when I read in NMSC’s annual report that college-sponsored National Merit Scholarships are “renewable awards of $500 to $2,000,” because I know people who have gotten much larger merit awards. But then I looked at the University of Minnesota’s website. They give out quite a few National Merit scholarships (129 university-sponsored, with another 37 National Merit Scholars attending on NMSC or corporate-sponsored awards). But it’s clear if you delve into the details that the University’s National Merit Scholarship is only $1,000 to $2,000 (depending on need) a year for 4 years; to be eligible, you need to name Minnesota as your first-choice school. But then they also have things like the Gold Scholar Award ($10,000/year for 4 years, preference given to NMFs who name Minnesota as their first choice—but presumably some of these could go to NMFs who didn’t list Minnesota as their first choice, or even to non-NMFs). Or the Bentson/Niblick Scholarship ($2,500/year for 4 years, preference to NMFs). And so on, including numerous merit awards that don’t specifically mention a preference for NMFs, but could easily be awarded to NMFs to sweeten the pot. Many of the 129 NMS at Minnesota on university-sponsored National Merit Scholarships could easily be getting significantly larger merit money from one or more of these scholarships. and many of the 37 National Merit Scholars attending Minnesota on NMSC or corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarships could also be “stacking” additional University-based merit awards on top of the relatively modest Nation Merit Scholarship.</p>
<p>Agree with post #49 and #46. My kid received more money from my corporation so it does not make sense to move to be selected for the $2500 award. She would have to turn down $8000+ corporate award for $2500 NMS award to go any school. Why??</p>
<p>collegealum, dunno about state schools (bclintonk did a thorough look at UMinn). Rice offers $1k a year for NMFs who put Rice as their #1 choice. I’ve no idea how they deal with students who are offered the NMSC money–it may be that they give them $1500 in later years to “make up” for the shortfall between NMSC’s $2500 and Rice’s $4k. </p>
<p>It’s also possible that some students didn’t list Rice as their #1 pick on the NM form. Speaking from personal experience I can tell you that no, you are not initially required to put a #1 school choice on the form. Often, it’s best for a student to put down “undecided” on the form. This might have changed since the 90’s–no experience with the process in that decade. <here follow="" tedious="" details="" of="" nm="" school="" selection="" strategy="">Most (but not all) schools that offer big NM money will allow students to choose them as thier #1 school after students have received admissions offers. That gives the student some options, the better to maximize any chance of NM money. Let’s say that an NMF applied to Harvard and Alabama. The student gets into both, and decides to attend Harvard. If the student had written down Alabama as the #1 choice, then Alabama would have offered them the school-sponsored scholarship as soon as they were admitted. The student would then be ineligible for the NMSC award, but wouldn’t be using the Alabama award. By waiting until after acceptances were in hand to write down Harvard as the #1 choice, the student now can remain eligible for the NMSC money.</here></p>
<p>Gotta love how Harvard gets love from the OP and a few others for having the largest number of NMSC-funded National Merit Scholars, while the head of Harvard admissions has criticized the NM program for their lack of “transparency”. This is called eating your cake and having it, too.</p>