NMS $2500 vs. college-sponsored scholarships

texaspg
Sat, 09 Feb 2013 09:04:34 +0000

The corporate scholarships are usually given to employees’ kids. When you are named NMSF, you are required to name your parents’ places of employment and NMSC contacts the employers with your name and asks them to provide a scholarship. I am not certain how many companies provide these scholarships to kids with no affiliation (I assume there are always companies doing this but don’t know how many such non-affiliated scholarships may exist). Some of the earliest announcements of scholarship come out for company sponsored ones so NMSC can start naming scholars instead of finalists.

The companies can name scholarships for whatever amounts they want and even provide that amount for all 4 years of college. I know one company giving 2500 all 4 years while another gave a lumpsum of 4000 in the first year. NMSC does control the disbursement of this money even from corporations and they separate it out by semester or quarter. My D is in a quarter system and they have been doling out 833/834 a quarter, a week after the quarter starts.

I have seen NMSC give their own scholarships at periodic intervals. They release a few in the beginning (April or so), a few more in May and as late as July. I don’t know if July happens because they keep some saved until the end or if some people need to give up their scholarships because of their school process.

I have seen in the past that some schools have policies where one can accept either 1000 annual scholarship from the school or 2500 one time from national merit (I can no longer name names but just remember these discussions from the past years). I believe these are explicitly called national merit and NMSC keeps track of them.

On the dates issue - D put down one school early on, at the NMSF stage. By end of January, we had pulled the application altogether from that school since it was no longer a viable option. However, since there was no other school in the picture which awarded National merit naming money (you name us, we give big scholarship), we let it ride. We changed the school named by NMSC only after May 1st since D picked a college on April 30th and there was no money from the school.

I see lots of people debating Bama here. You may want to start a thread in Bama area since people there are very sophisticated about national merit money in relationship to Bama.