I was worried about my daughters losing their merit scholarships but it has proven not to be an issue. One, who is in engineering and had the bigger scholarships to lose, never came close to it happening. The other did flirt with a loss but did an appeal and we loaded a lot of specific courses we thought she’d do well in to get the gpa back up. I think a 3.0 is do-able, a 3.2 is tough, and a 3.5 should really really considered when comparing FA offers. A 3.5 is tough.
All the above things go into the freshman levels being higher - the loss of merit scholarships because of gpa, the transfers, some one time scholarships. Another reason might be that the schools increase the amount of merit for freshmen because the tuition increases, but the upperclassmen’s merit awards were fixed when they were freshmen. For example, a junior might be getting the max merit scholarship from 3 years ago which was $15k, but now the max is $18k so the freshmen are getting $18k (and everyone is paying the same tuition!! Yea.)
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