<p>Harvard in fact has the most NMF’s. </p>
<p>This is a CC post on NMF (National Merit Finalists or NMF) in different schools in 2007, where ASU is pretty low down the list of MMF’s. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/454412-national-merit-scholars-2007-schools-have-most.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/454412-national-merit-scholars-2007-schools-have-most.html</a></p>
<p>However This seems to conflict with this announcement on the ASU site where they claim they had the 4th highest National Merit Scholars (NMS) in 2004 and they were continuing to actively recruit NMF’s for the Barrett Honors college in 2007.</p>
<p>[ASU</a> ranks 4th in nation for freshman National Merit Scholars](<a href=“http://www.asu.edu/feature/includes/spring05/readmore/nationalmerit.html]ASU”>ASU ranks 4th in nation for freshman National Merit Scholars)</p>
<p>The reason for this mismatch is the difference between NMF and NMS. Looking at the 2007 list.</p>
<p>number of NMS recipients not sponsored by school itself, total NMS recipients, number of NMS recipients sponsored by the school, name of school
285 285 0 Harvard College
183 183 0 Yale University
179 179 0 Princeton University
164 164 0 Stanford University
138 138 0 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
.
.
23 150 127 Arizona State University </p>
<p>In 2007, Harvard has 285 NMF’s and they gave no NMF scholarships. So out of the 285 NMF’s, some may have got money from other places (NMSC, Corporations), others got nothing but they are still NMF and it counts in the NMF total.</p>
<p>For ASU, there were 150 NMF’s, of which 23 either did not get NM scholarships or got it from an outside source and 127 got scholarships from ASU it self. So I am going to hazard a guess that ASU had 150 NM Scholarship Winners and 150 National Merit Finalists i.e. everyone got a NM Scholarship if they were NMF. In other words they had 150 NMF and 150 NMS. Harvard on the other hand may have 285 National Merit Finalists but (just pulling a number out of my hat) only 80 were National Merit Scholarship Winners. So they had 80 students who got some money (hence Scholarship winners) but 285 NMF’s i.e. 205 people got no money or 285 NMF and 80 NMS. (Please remember this 80 is made up number and I would think it is even lower).</p>
<p>So, who ranks highest depends on your metric. If the the metric is “Number of National Merit Finalists”, the Ivy’s rank much higher than most other schools.</p>
<p>If the metric is “Number of National Merit Scholarship Winners”, schools like ASU and UT Austin used to rank higher as they gave a lot of the scholarships. National Merit Scholarship winners is a subset of National Merit Finalists. Only about half the NMF’s (about 8000 out of 16000) get official NMF scholarships (not the add ons) and most of those are from schools. </p>
<p>I know this sounds a little confusing, but you have to be clear what you are measuring: Number of Finalists or Number of Winners and you will get different answers based on that metric.</p>
<p>ASU is now cutting back on NM Scholarships, so I will guess that they will loose on both counts: NMF’s and NMS.</p>