Fordham GPA Cutoff...

WillyWankaWannaB
Sat, 03 Nov 2007 12:14:23 +0000

Nice to see another Fordham alum.

Reading your past posts I can tell that you are up on the current status of Fordham. My son is a freshman at FCRH and loves it, so I hope the best with your daughter and this whole chaotic application process. Fortunately, I have a 5yr hiatus before I need to go through it again.

I wish I could give great advice on the merit scholarship process at Fordham, but it is unpredictable because so many “soft” factors are considered after the student meets a minimum class rank/SAT threshold. This, I gathered from speaking to a few of the admissions counsellors last year.

The Fordham website seems to be true on the big scholarships to some extent. The Presidential and Jesuit scholarships appear to be limited to at most 20 students, where the SAT has a minimum 700V/700M and a class rank in the top 10%. This scholarship (from my observation) seems to be used to attract those special students (whether from the US or International) that Fordham thinks they would not get if not for this very generous full tuition/room/board scholarship. I also think that there are various reasons that come into play as to who they offer this scholarship to. But, no doubts about it, it is an extremely selective scholarship. And when you consider these 20 offerings are being split between students from Jesuit and non-Jesuit high schools, it’s virutally unpredictable from a parent’s viewpoint if their son/daughter has a good shot at it, considering there will be over 22,000 applicants.

The National Merit scholarship which covers full tuition only is sort of interesting. It doesn’t matter if the student is a finalist or not. In fact, being a semifinalist doesn’t mean that the student will automatically qualify for this scholarship. The student needs to be in the top 10% of the class. Also, if a student has a very high PSAT score and may have missed the semifinalist cut-off for his/her state but would have easily been considered a semifinalist in most of the other states, they could still offer this scholarship to the “Commended” student. I think Fordham has about 45 National Merit scholarship recipients in the Class of 2011.

The next level of merit scholarship, the Dean’s Scholarship, just says that a minimum of 670V/670M with being in the top 10% of the class is required to be considered. And, without showing a need based component, it seems that the scholarship is at $10,000.

But, one thing that I can definitely say, is that Fordham gives very strong consideration to the essay, the showing of a genuine commitment to social service, and how genuine and strong the interest and desire is to go to Fordham. Especially, now there are large enough numbers of excellent students who are applying that WANT to come to Fordham. My son applied very early in the early action session, and it definitely seemed to have been noticed by a couple of the admission officers that he came to the big Open House for prospective applicants in the October/November time frame. They remembered his application.

I also think a lot can be deduced from what happened with Fordham College’s small Honors Program on Rose Hill this year. They normally take in a maximum of 25 freshman to the program, and can usually predict how many kids to offer a spot to in order to achieve this number of 25. In this year’s freshman class, they offered the Honors Program to 36 students (thinking that about a dozen would turn it down because of not attending Fordham), but 35 of the 36 accepted (making this the largest Freshman Honors class at FCRH ever). Extra sections needed to be added in order to keep the class sizes down to do its seminar format. All of these kids could have gone off to an Ivory League school, but chose Fordham instead. In fact, I think the lone one that turned down a spot went to Harvard.

This is why it is so difficult to figure out who will get a particular merit scholarship. But, good luck, it’s a process that I’m glad to be finished with for awhile.