ken_sylvania wrote: ↑Tue Apr 16, 2024 1:55 pmIn other words, are you saying that among the merit scholarships offered by any single one of the second tier schools (Trinity, for instance) the better a student's grades the better the offer he will get?
But that if a particular student is offered merit scholarships at three different universities it is quite likely that the most generous package will come from the school that is the most desperate to increase its ranking rather than coming from the best school?
Exactly. In fact, the top schools in every category generally do not ever offer merit scholarships at all. None of the Ivy League schools offer any merit scholarships. None. They offer full financial aid for students with demonstrated financial need. But zero in the way of merit scholarships. For example, this is what Harvard says:
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-a ... ted%20need.
There are no merit-based awards, and we have no preferential policies that give some students more attractive awards than others. When you qualify for financial aid from Harvard, we create an individualized aid package to meet all of your demonstrated need.
On the other hand, next door Boston University very much wants to be more like Harvard but they know full well that a student given the choice will go to Harvard. And so they offer price discounts in the form of Merit Scholarships and have a giant list of them:
https://www.bu.edu/admissions/tuition-a ... ear-merit/
BU offers a wide variety of merit scholarships, some even covering full tuition, to recognize high achieving students who go above and beyond. Most awards are for academic achievement, while others go to talented athletes, performers, and artists. Plus, merit-based awards don’t require you to submit a financial aid application and do not have to be repaid.
I promise you that Boston University students are no more meritorious than Harvard students. They just have to offer price discounts to be competitive with the schools that they perceive themselves as competing with for students.
Same thing happens with public Universities. Here in Washington, the University of Washington is the premier flagship university in the Pacific Northwest and is fairly selective (they get their pick of students). Consequently they offer no merit aid to in-state students. They offer very tiny amounts to top out-of-state students but that is mainly because they want those out-of-state tuition dollars. So they will give top out of state students a $5,000 merit scholarship so they can get that $30,000 out-of-state tuition premium and attract that student away from UCLA. By contrast, the other public universities in Washington such as Western Washington University and Washington State have lots of merit scholarships based on grades and test scores because they are trying to attract top students away from UW.
The other thing that all schools do it take merit scholarships off the top before calculating financial aid. So for example, if a school has tuition at $50,000 and they offer you a $10,000 merit scholarship and it turns out that based on your FASFA forms your expected family contribution is only $30,000. They will count your merit scholarship as part of your financial aid formula and give you only $10,000 in financial aid rather than the full $20,000. So it just becomes a matter of semantics whether they are giving you $20,000 in financial aid or $10,000 in merit aid and $10,000 in financial aid. The net price is the same. They just offered you the merit scholarship BEFORE you were accepted to as a recruitment incentive but your financial aid award came afterwards.
Bottom line? The amount of merit scholarship offered by any particular school is very carefully calibrated to be just enough to attract a particular student away from the competition but no more than that since that would be throwing money away and universities are not in the business of throwing money away. They will also bargain with you like you are in a Turkish bazar. My middle daughter had very high academic credentials and was accepted into all 10 schools that she applied to. I did a big spread sheet of the different tuition costs and merit offers we got from various schools and it turned out that her 2nd choice school was offering less than the competition. I sent the admissions office an email showing what their competition was offering and they came back immediately with an offer to bump her merit scholarship up by $10K to match and exceed the competition. She didn't end up going there but it was interesting to see how quickly they bargained.