I’m assuming the trustee/presidential merit based scholarships at these schools are very competitive. Can someone quantify this or give example of how difficult it is to earn this scholarship?
If someone has won it, can they give stats so I can have an idea?
Also, since the first two offer NMS scholarships, I will likely end up pursuing those instead of the big merit scholarships because I feel there is no point in even applying for them.
Any thoughts or feedback?
If you don’t apply for the scholarships you definitely won’t get them. At BU the NMF scholarship is automatic if a finalist and BU is your first choice. You don’t “pursue” it. The BU Trustees scholarships are given to the top 30 or so applicants out of a freshman class of 3400.
My D (HS class of 2015) had a 4.2 W, 1570 SAT and received no merit from BU. I wish NMF had been an option.
My daughter recently applied to USC, so I have been researching the stats posts here to get an idea of how competitive the merit scholarships are. In the past three years, over 300 people posted their results. Of those who were selected for merit scholarship interviews, the average unweighted GPA is about 3.92 and the average test scores are about 1500 SAT & 33.5 ACT. Of course there are many other subjective factors, but that will give you a rough idea.
Thanks for this info @Shimainu