<p>The whole National Merit Scholarship program is coming under a lot of criticism and a lot of pressure these days. Major players–6 campuses of the University of California system, the University of Texas, Wake Forest, and NYU–have pulled out in recent years, some because they no longer want to commit scarce financial aid dollars to high test-scorers without need, instead preferring to commit those dollars to students with demonstrated need; some because the NMSC is non-transparent about the socioeconomic distribution of award winners (though given the strong correlation between standardized test scores and household income, these colleges suspect the program systematically advantages affluent & predominantly white students); and some because at a philosophical level they object to NMSC’s practice of making the major screening decision on the basis of a single standardized test score. Others, including all the Ivy League colleges, have been non-participants, sometimes disdainful non-participants, for years. </p>
<p>Many public school districts are also pulling out of district-funded PSAT testing, questioning the use of scarce tax resources for a test the principal use of which appears to be to qualify a tiny handful of students for non-need-based “merit” scholarships. If that trend continues, it would tend to make the National Merit Scholarship program even more a competition among students in affluent school districts and elite private prep schools for “vanity dollars” or “aid for the affluent.”</p>
<p>The College Board which administers the SAT and the PSAT is, of course, not critical; the National Merit Scholarship competition is probably THE most important element in its marketing strategy for one of its major products, the PSAT. The National Merit competition also reinforces the College Board’s principal product, the SAT, because National Merit Semifinalists can’t advance to Finalist without SAT scores, so many Semifinalists with strong ACT scores who otherwise have no reason to take the SAT feel compelled to plunk down the dollars and take the SAT. The ACT has repeatedly been rebuffed by the NMSC in its efforts to get in on this action. Sleazy.</p>
<p>NMF= national merit FINALIST. That means there is another round of competition, something which many people are not aware of.</p>
<p>The point is that there is a difference between winning the competition and being a finalist.<br>
No one expects people to turn down a 1/2 tuition scholarship for a $2500 award. It’s not the point.</p>
<p>The one thing that people need to keep in mind is that there are schools where students take the PLAN and not the PSAT. The PLAN students go on to take the ACT not the SAT. So again, not sure what the numbers are, but the NMS do not cover the entire population. </p>
<p>Anytime you receive money on the basis is being an NMF, whether from NMSC, your college, or a sponsoring company (as when your parent works for UPS) you then become a NMS. So those students who attend USC on the 1/2 tuition scholly are now NMS.</p>
<p>The PSAT is not only marketed as an avenue to scholarships; it’s marketed as a prep test for the SAT just as the PLAN is marketed as a prep test for the ACT. We have way more kids take the PLAN here vs the PSAT but I don’t hear anyone throwing ACT corp under the bus.
on the basis of qualifying for</p>
<p>Gac. Can’t go back & edit my last post but ignore the last line. Phone wouldn’t let me delete it and I got on the computer after the editing window closed.</p>
<p>Absolutely right, and HIMom didn’t “miss the point” in post #80. She makes a perfectly valid point: It makes absolutely no sense to view the 2500 NMSC-sponsored awards as somehow more prestigious than college-sponsored or corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarships, which in many cases are worth a lot more money. We don’t know how many or which of the college-sponsored or corporate-sponsored NMSs would have gone on to win NMSC-sponsored scholarships had they not already been made National Merit Scholars by virtue of a college-sponsored or corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarship, and which of the eventual NMSC-sponsored scholarship winners they would have displaced had this larger group of college- and corporate-sponsored NMS remained in the selection pool. It’s not as if the NMSC-sponsored award is somehow a higher honor; it’s just a different avenue of selection.</p>
<p>NMSC itself takes the position that all National Merit Finalists are deserving of scholarships, but there’s just not enough money to go around. NMSC would absolutely love to have more college sponsors and corporate sponsors; if they had enough college and corporate sponsors to fund National Merit Scholarships for 100% of the Finalists, they’d take it in a heartbeat. But only 193 colleges and universities sponsor such scholarships, and those colleges don’t necessarily match up that well with where many of the highest-achieving students want to go—though on the other hand, many are quite happy to take the college award which often is packaged with much more valuable additional merit-based aid. Similarly, only 240 corporations sponsor National Merit Scholarships, and their narrow eligibility criteria exclude most Finalists. But the program will try to cover as many Finalists as it can through those two avenues, and only then will NMSC step in and fund a fraction of the remaining finalists with what pretty much amounts to a token award, because that’s all NMSC can afford to fund. So it’s not as if this is one big competition leading to the uber-prestigious NMSC-sponsored scholarship award and some people take themselves out of the competition by going for college- or corporate-sponsored awards. Rather there are 3 distinct avenues by which a Finalist may become a National Merit Scholar, and NMSC is funding scholarships for some of those who elected not to go for a college-sponsored scholarship and didn’t qualify for a corporate-sponsored scholarship—i.e., those left over after the first two avenues (which together represent about 70% of all the National Merit Scholarships awarded, and an even larger fraction of the awards by dollar value) are exhausted.</p>
<p>“It makes absolutely no sense to view the 2500 NMSC-sponsored awards as somehow more prestigious than college-sponsored or corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarships, which in many cases are worth a lot more money.”</p>
<p>“It’s not as if the NMSC-sponsored award is somehow a higher honor; it’s just a different avenue of selection.”
Exactly.</p>
<p>Totally agree with bclintonk in post#88 that NMSC would love to have more money and sponsors, college or corporate, to give more NMFs scholarships. </p>
<p>As far as any criticism and pressure of NMSC for how they choose to award money–well, it’s entirely up to NMSC to decide how to award funds. I said this upthread, I’ve said it in other threads, and I’ll repeat it once again: it is the height of chutzpah for colleges that have their own nontransparent mechanisms for awarding admission and aid, need-based or merit, to complain about how NMSC chooses to award funds. If a college wants to use other criteria for distributing their own aid dollars, they’re free to do so. And notice how some schools that disdainfully don’t sponsor NM scholarships, but have many NMS’s attending, are being held up by the OP and others on this thread as being excellent schools simply because they have lots of NMS’s. William Fitzsimmons, lucky man, gets to have it both ways! :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I have one kid who got money from her school via the NM program. Her younger sister ain’t going to be a contender. But I love that she has the opportunity to take a “practice” SAT under low-stakes, low-cost conditions that model the real thing. If I tried to set up the option to do a practice run at home, she’d balk. Doing a PSAT at school is a great opportunity for her, and for other kids who have absolutely no shot at NM. RobD pointed out how the ACT folks do the same thing with the PLAN test. Sure, the prep tests are a moneymaker for both testing companies, but they do provide a useful service.</p>
<p>^It varies from U to U. Some give automatic scholarships to any NMF’s who are accepted. Others have limited funds available and choose who will receive scholarships. For all Universities the student must designate that U as his “1st choice”, some require this to be done early, others no later than the mid May NMSF deadline.</p>
<p>I don’t know exactly how it works. However, I guess once a NMF designates a college that sponsors the program, an award is set aside for this NMF. The NMF will lose the award if he/she does not attend any college that sponsors the program. In that sense, the NMF can re-designate another college if he/she changes his/her mind later as long as the deadline is not past.</p>
<p>In some cases, the college-sponsored award can be lower than the $2500 National Merit Scholarship if the college only gives at most $500 per year.</p>
<p>The consensus is that all the scholarships are equally prestigious. If some of them are automatically given by choosing a college, I fail to see how winning the scholarship is any more prestigious than being a finalist and choosing a school (such as Harvard) which doesn’t give merit scholarships.</p>
<p>The money is sent to NMSF from the sponsoring college and then distributed to each NMS after classes have started as a credit to the students account. .</p>
<p>Following another line of thought, all National Merit Finalists are “qualified” for money. Just like 90% of applicants are “qualified” for MIT and/or HYP of (according to their own admission staff.) However, only some get money in the scholarship competition and some get admitted because there are a limited amount of money or spots open, respectively. It seems like the same logic, right?</p>
<p>Geez Louise, why is it so hard to comprehend here that the 2500 winners of the $2500 National Merit Scholarship Award directly from the NMSC were selected after a final holistic review conducted by the organization that looks at a variety of different factors like SAT/ ACT scores, ECs, recommendations, essays, etc. among the pool of National Merit Finalists unlike the school-sponsored awards or the corporate sponsored awards that are handed out as long as a student becomes a National Merit Finalist and not neccessarily if he is determined to be an official winner after.</p>
<p>Collegealum314 and I are on the same page here while some oversensitive parents are getting riled for no apparent reason since we differ on the nomenclature surrounding the “true” winners and the finalists who sponsored by their schools or universities. The list I posted was the matriculation numbers of the $2500 final winners of the National Merit Awards determined independently by the NMSC in descending order of enrollment at the best American schools. This doesn’t take away from the accomplishment of all those USC and Alabama students who earned NMF status and were offered a boatload of money to the school-rather I’m saying that in terms of recognition there’s no distinction between a student who wins the official award and also attends a college that sponsors NMFs but of course the big college scholarship will take precedence over the relatively speaking tiny $2500 cash award offered by the NMSC.</p>
<p>An Alabama freshman who reached NMF status will get the full-ride scholarship through college sponsorship but if he is independently determined to be one of the $2500 ultimate winners by NMSC, he will also receive recognition as a National Merit Scholar. That’s exactly what happened to 20+ Alabama students according to this year’s report. They got a full-ride to Tuscaloosa and got recognition as being National Merit Scholars since they were one of the 2500 winners but they didn’t get the cash prize since the money Alabama offered them obviously trumps that. The list on page 38-40 takes all of this into account.</p>
<p>I believe the National Merit winner list is a good proxy of student body strength by my reckoning. It is the only independently administered process to discover the “strongest” students after a holistic review of academics, essays and background of a wide swathe of the American population outside the college admissions process.</p>
<p>I posted this list because it’s important to show that the majority of “super qualified” kids in the country enroll in the best private schools. It’s an urban myth that the “best and brightest” are uniformly scattered all over the country that bclintonk seems to suggest.</p>
<p>Berkeley is the only public school with a National Merit Scholar enrolllment count that matches that of the lower Ivies, Chicago and Duke though obviously it’s a much bigger school. Even if you place yourself in the Honors Program at your local flagship state school, you’re not going to be surrounding yourself with as many brilliant minds as you would at the lower 5 Ivies, Chicago, Duke and definitely not HYPSM since there’s a relative paucity of scholars to begin with and the best schools snatch up the vast majority of them.</p>
<p>some dont bother to send NMSF their 1st choice cards for various reasons- they have deferred going to college, they dont need the relatively small $$ for college expenses, they are going to a college that doesn’t sponsor NMS’s, such as many state U’s, CC’s, Ivys, and other private colleges, U’s in other country, etc, etc.</p>