Any college buying them with merit scholarships doesn't count, kids didn't choose it, their circumstances made the decision. |
Harvard, MIT, Yale, Rice, Amherst, Princeton and similar top schools type doesn't offer any merit scholarships. |
This is important to note, and counters what the other PP stated, about who gets chosen. |
How so, I mean 50 colleges is quite a large range and it still leaves 35% to go elsewhere. And some of these on this list are sort of middle range schools that may offer some merit aid. |
There are 2 kinds of NMS in college. Some colleges do not sponsor NMS, so that all NMS number in the list are those of 2500 chosen by college board. Other colleges sponsor NMS, which means that all NM finalist in their student body were sponsored to be NMS. Obviously, the former means more. It is easy to check the 2 kinds of colleges by googling if the college sponsor national merit scholarship, or get it directly from college board.
Of the colleges not sponsor NMS, the T10 list looks like following, either elite or heavily STEM: Harvard MIT Penn Stanford Yale Princeton Duke Berkeley GIT UT Austin |
UChicago no longer sponsors NMS |
Do you mind sharing the source OP? Spent sometime Googling and could not find it. TIA! |
UMD is pretty awesome. They sponsor 1K per year (for 4 years) as NMS scholarship for their accepted NMS Finalists. Even NMSC does not give this much $. However, UT Dallas is another level of money and privileges for any kid who is an NMS Finalist. They are given full ride (room, board, tuition), stipend, internships and research jobs, and money for a semester abroad. Also, their admissions deadline is May. |
Winners who attend a non sponsored college can get $2500 for use at any college. My kid won and used it at an ivy. |
What? NMS scholarship money (and often full rides) means that poor kids can get a robust college education for free and it changes the fortunes of families. I wish more colleges would give the merit scholarships. NMS does not have deep pockets. Also, many top colleges do not take NMS scholars because they unfortunately happen to be high performing Asian-Americans. So it is fantastic that these colleges are giving them the NMS scholarship and acknowledging that their achievements was not in vain. Also, many corporations also sponsor NMS scholarships for their employee's children. |
They can, but not all of them will. NMSC only awards 2500 of these types of scholarships out of the 14k-ish finalists. |
Was your kid an URM, low SES, first gen, recruited athlete or legacy? What was your kid's hook? |
Likewise for Northwestern |
Not really. A lot of the schools give full rides, including room and board, to winners. That’s what the numbers are high. Not because they are better schools. The “better” schools don’t need to give merit scholarships. |
4000 colleges. 50 (about 1% of them) get 65% of NMS. More when you account for top lacs since this list is by volume. You don’t find that statistically significant? |