OOS merit aid at PSU?

roccorules
Tue, 22 Jun 2010 20:25:04 +0000

My daughter will be attending Penn State as a first year student in the fall. She will be majoring in International Politics, with a goal of becoming a Foreign Service Officer in the US Diplomatic Corps. Our experience is strictly with the College of the Liberal Arts, which is the college for her major.

Make no mistake, Penn State is quite stingy with merit based financial aid. As a basis for comparison with your child, my daughter ranked in the top 10% of a highly competitive HS Weighted GPA of 5.67) , SAT around 2100, many stints as servant leader of extracurricular organizations including our Town’s Government. She Captained her Girls Ice Hockey team for 4 years, this last year as they won the National Championship. She will be a student at Schreyer, which carried a small scholarship. But that’s it. She applied for (but did not receive) a scholarship directly from the College of the Liberal Arts. I understand that small scholarships from the College or Major to which you belong may be more possible in later years as a Sophomore or Junior. We’ll see.

I have heard that some of the Colleges do offer scholarship without the student even needing to apply for one, based on intangibles as well as tangibles (read: Legacy). The College of Engineering is one of the colleges to which you needn’t fill out an application for scholarship, you are automatically considered for one. I understand those scholarships, while helpful, are rather meager ($2500 - $3500 per year).

All that said, I am thrilled that my daughter is thrilled with her decision to attend Penn State. It will take belt-tightening down here in Texas, but we are happy that she has found a school about which she feels so excited.