| Peege, I think on the other end of the spectrum, you read a little bit too much into the NM scholarship award. It IS an honor and one that your son should be rightfully proud of, but the NM committee makes the decision on very limited information before them (grades, test scores, a letter from the school g.c. or principal, a very short essay from the applicant). Colleges have an overlapping but different set of information. National Merit is very highly regarded for colleges that are a notch below your son's target schools in terms of competitiveness. For example, your son would almost certainly have been admitted at Macalester, which actively recruits NM finanalists (and where of course he also is a legacy).
I guess an analogy would be this: if your son won $100,000 in a lottery, he'd feel rich. You would all celebrate. No one could deny that $100,000 was a lot of money. But let's say he decided that he would use that money to pay for 4 years of college -- he would find that the money is more than enough to pay for his attendance at the public university, but not nearly enough to pay for 4 years at Harvard, not because $100,000 isn't a lot of money, but because 4 years at Harvard happens to cost $200,000
So what your son has is lot of intellectual and academic capital, that will get him very far in life and certainly was more than enough to get him into almost any college, except for tiny eschelon of highly competitive schools that want more. And the frustrating part is that the more that was needed for the very top schools is slippery and intangible. |