Need and/or benefit. The benefit for less prestigious schools are the press releases about the number of NMF scholars that attend. An analogy would be the “hook” of being an URM, where the institutional benefit is the benefit of having a diverse student body. To your point, I agree that being an NMF is more an academic thing than being an URM, and the top schools probably don’t care that much about an applicant being an NMF as such.