Can competitive merit scholarships ever be considered as non-reach (i.e. match or likely)?
Generally, there is much less information about how easy or difficult it is to get a given (amount of) competitive merit scholarship at a given college than to get admission to the college. In addition, colleges may quietly change the number or size of competitive merit scholarships from year to year.
If competitive merit scholarships must always be considered reaches, then a student who needs one to afford a given college must consider that college a reach, even if admission is match, likely, or safety.
Wouldn’t that depend on the individual schools and what kind of merit is needed? Full-tuition and full ride scholarships are probably always tough and yes, if you can’t afford the school without full tuition then it’s not a safety. However, if your student is looking to simply drop the tuition price, there are certainly some schools a good student could count on for both admission and merit.
What’s the definition of “competitive” vs “automatic”? Plenty of colleges have merit aid that shows up in the NPC without any statement that the aid award is automatic for a particular GPA/ACT/SAT score. Our experience was that in several cases the actual amount of merit aid went up or down compared to what the NPC showed before applying, presumably based on the level of competition within the applicant pool, so I wouldn’t consider those scholarships to be automatic.
And what’s the definition of reach/match/likely? Is it that the probability of getting an acceptable offer is <20%, 40%, 80% (or whatever numbers you want to choose)? If you take the non-automatic NPC merit aid case above, then (admittedly based on a small sample) the probability of getting at least the amount of aid that was shown in the NPC was more like 50%+ than <20%, so I would not consider it made those schools a reach (for a school that was a match or likely admit independent of merit aid).
My opinion @ucbalumnus
Any scholarship that is competitive should be viewed as possibly NOT being received. It will be a happy surprise if the student receives it.
And here is what students should do. Every family should have an annual college budget that the parents can pay. This should be understood fully by the student. Sure…apply for competitive scholarships…but if the money is not forthcoming, the student needs to understand that the college will need to be removed from consideration.
“And here is what students should do. Every family should have an annual college budget that the parents can pay. This should be understood fully by the student. Sure…apply for competitive scholarships…but if the money is not forthcoming, the student needs to understand that the college will need to be removed from consideration.”
This is exactly what we did in our house. We considered any college that required an award of merit (where that merit was competitive and not automatic) in order to make attendance affordable to be a reach.