National Merit Finalist vs National Merit Scholar

STEMFamily
Sat, 19 Mar 2016 01:06:20 +0000

Corporate-sponsored scholarship winners are selected by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation from names supplied to them by the company. In many cases, these are competitive. There are actually many cases of competitive college-sponsored awards too, but the ones that are packaged with the large awards that are guaranteed to all Finalists who attend the school are often the most publicized.

http://www.newson6.com/story/28864838/ou-president-national-merit-program-makes-oklahoma-education-so-much-more

http://ou.edu/content/publicaffairs/archives/OUMakesHistoryWithRecordSettingNumberOfFreshmanNationalMeritScholars.html

https://www.ou.edu/admissions/nationalmerit.html

The first is a link to a news report showing an advertising video clip by David Boren repeatedly claiming that Oklahoma “leads the nation in National Merit Scholars enrolled.” The last two are right off of OU’s website. Alabama publishes similar claims. A significant majority of these are college-sponsored winners (267 out of 313 total at Oklahoma last year). You can bet that National Merit Scholarship Corporation would crack down on these claims that have been published for several years now if they did not condone calling all NMSC scholarship winners of any type a National Merit Scholar.