<p>while PSU gives out a large amount (total), it has to spread it out over a large number of students. Their philosophy is to try to reduce the costs of an education to as many students as possible. There is less of a separation between top students and average. So the answer would have to be no. It has, and will, continue to get worse. As the state expects PSU to absorb more of its costs while keeping in-state tuition, and tuition over all, low the monies that other schools use for things like these scholarships (what you and others call merit-based scholarships) has to now be applied to other things. The state support has dwindled to a trickle. Ironically, schools like Pitt and Temple get a larger percentage of their budget from the state than PSU does. Go figure. PSU gets more dollars , but as a percentage of budget or corrected for the number of students it gets less. For reasons I’m not sure the legislators seem not to be concerned with placing conditions on pitt and temple.
I’m sure you are applying there too, but NC schools do very well with state funding and thus, keep tuition low.
There are college-specific scholarships at PSU, which I consider to be true or purely merit based that are very generous. These are not need based and the competition is exceptionally high. The ones I am aware of tend to be filled by Ivy-league caliber students, and I’m not talking Cornell or Brown here, the top ivies, UChicago etc.</p>