Sarah Lawrence offers merit scholarships, according to their website. https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/financial-aid/undergraduate/sarah-lawrence-aid.html
This is a great idea for a list but it looks like the original blog that this one copied the list from, was written in 2012.
Highly selective, expensive private schools tend to emphasize need-based aid.
However, some lesser-known or slightly less selective private schools do offer merit scholarships in the $15K-$25K range. Examples: Oberlin, Hendrix, St. Lawrence, Lawrence U., Agnes Scott, Rhodes … Case Western, Tulane, URochester, GWU, Pepperdine, Villanova.
Highly selective private universities that have offered merit scholarships (in the recent past, at least) include Vanderbilt, Rice, Duke, UChicago, UND. These awards may be few in number or small in average amount.
Kiplinger has a nice list showing both the percentage of students receiving merit aid (non-need) and the average amount of that aid: https://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-best-college-values-college-finder/index.php#Table
The article is being written as though it is revealing a hidden dirty secret than no parents know. My own experience is quite the opposite of the author’s claims - most parents do not expect much merit money at all. Parents whose kids are very high achieving, academically, are generally the ones who are most familiar with the college admissions process, and are familiar with the merit money that is available.
I think that the author is pandering to the small set of middle class parents whose kids are high stats who know what’s going on, and are bitter because they believe that their kid deserves money for having achieved high grades and high SAT scores. These parents are unhappy when they discover that kids from lower income families with the same scores do receive financial aid.
Colleges provide merit aid to attract students who are very high performing, academically. College which are already have far more of these students than they can accept do not need to offer them money. On the other hand, they often do need to financially support high performing students from low income families. So these colleges tend to have very good financial aid.
Financial aid IS merit aid. It just is earmarked for low income families.
Nope. They would say “why should we pay excellent students to attend our university when we have so many excellent students begging to be accepted that need to reject 80% of them?” they would also say “all students who we accept are excellent, so we’d rather spend our money on kids who are excellent, but cannot afford college, rather than on kids who already have enough money to attend college but want more”.
As others have pointed out, he didn’t even do his homework well.
In addition to the other examples on this thread, Dartmouth, Trinity, Bryn Mawr, Bucknell, Vassar, Colby, Mount Holyoke, Wheaton, Connecticut College, Middlebury, Wellesley, and Cornell University are all Posse Scholarship partners. Each provides 10-30 full tuition merit scholarships a year to Posse Scholars. That is anywhere from $2 million to $6 million in scholarships a year*.
“Financial aid IS merit aid. It just is earmarked for low income families.”
Interesting way to look at it.
Among “low income families”, the amount of aid is dependent on financial need, not academic or other accomplishments.
Wow according to Kiplingers Clark has 69% receiving non need based aid?
Isn’t the entire point of merit aid to be an incentive for a highly talented student to attend that particular university? For a student from a low income family, being able to afford colleges with low acceptance rates and high tuition costs is that type of incentive.
As an aside: the author of the piece seems especially angry at Reed College - it appears twice on that list…
It is an interesting way to look at it: the student clearly has enough academic merit to be offered a place, so they are giving the student what they need to attend. I kind of like that perspective.
Plenty more to add to the list in the first paragraph in #21. You can add Fordham in there, who judging from some posts (and our own experience) seem pretty generous with merit (vs what expectations might be).
[quote=“RichInPitt, post:26, topic:2082622”]
Exactly. Achievements can help with admissions and need based merit scholarships but financial aid is purely need based and most top colleges are need blind so financial aid departments are separate from admissions.
Aid is determined by FAFSA entries, it’s not that number one in the list would get more and number 100 less if their EFC is equal.
What can I say? Some people write articles without even the most basic of fact checks. Evidently, Joe Messinger, a self-proclaimed “leading authority on late-stage college funding”, is one of them.
That is one of the reasons that I am skeptical of so many “college experts”. So many of them are like Mr. Messinger. They claim to be “experts”, and claim to possess knowledge that is not readily available to “regular” people, yet seem ignorant of facts that are related to their expertise which can be found with a simple Google search.
Just based on my own child, I know Conn College and Wheaton are wrong, and I know Skidmore offers just two very specific merit scholarships (music and stem) so it should be ON the list (https://www.skidmore.edu/financialaid/freshmen_faq.php)
I’ve got friends who hired college “experts” and came away with information that was erroneous AND financial aid suggestions (on how to maximize your aid) which was illegal. So I’m with MWolf!
I have to admit I emailed them a rather crusty response to their post pointing out the inaccuracy of the list and mentioning that it didn’t inspire confidence in their financial management services. IIRC I wrote something like “I would never hire a wealth manager who was so slipshod as to post unverified information from an eight year old blog without doing any fact checking.” Okay, a little harsh, but predictably the response I received by email began,
?
But Rick told them that he could guarantee that their kid would be accepted to USC with financial aid!
The Rick issues are a rich person’s problem and I don’t have a lot of sympathy there.
But I’m talking about things that middle class and upper middle folks don’t realize are illegal-- the asset shifts aka “gifts” which then come back to the giver, hiding money in grandma’s checking account until the FAFSA gets filed, re-titling the family home to a brother-in-law and paying nominal rent (brother in law now has a “business” which he can wash all sorts of expenses through; the parents are no longer home owners so they will look poorer on paper, that sort of thing.)
And of course- most of the time, it yields very modest increases in financial aid since most colleges do not meet full need- it’s such a waste of time and effort.
Did I forget putting the family dog on the payroll? This works better when the dog’s name is Craig or Joanne, doesn’t work as well when his name is Lassie. But it’s nice to cash Lassie’s paychecks every month AND decrease your business income/profits at the same time! At least Lassie doesn’t get to lease a car on the company…
It doesn’t matter if illegal or unethical measures are being tried by wealthy or poor or middle income for manipulating results of admissions, aid or scholarship … illegal remains illegal and unethical remains unethical.
Did I overlook Georgetown? I don’t believe they offer any merit scholarships.
It was a well-meant effort on @CupCakeMuffins’ part but the list itself is garbage.