<p>Do you actually need merit for him to attend, or would it just be nice to have the extra money? This is too late to help you, but the best time to look into merit is before applying, especially if your situation is the former.</p>
<p>You first check the university’s main scholarship page. They often have a page devoted solely to general scholarships for incoming freshmen. Some have very detailed requirements to get into the pool, or as for UA, to get automatic $$. At others it is a bit murkier, but there is always some kind of info and one can contact the scholarship office to obtain more specific guidelines. There will usually be some merit that is awarded ‘holistically’ and some that is purely stats driven. Some money may be earmarked for instate, intl., particular low-income school districts, etc., so need to pay attention to that. Then you poke around in eng. dept. site to see if they have any good info about their departmental scholarships, and contact them as well if needed. </p>
<p>This will help with making the college list if you don’t qualify for FA but merit is essential for school to be affordable. Eg, for your son’s stats, UAB would have given automatic $12K/yr + possibly more from eng. (up to $4,500/yr.)</p>
<p>I can’t say if he qualifies for any holistic money at the schools he applied to. Does he have some high-level awards in robotics, or other ‘hooks’? </p>
<p>To look at a couple of his schools’ stats based merit:</p>
<p>Rutgers-for general freshman scholarships, the lowest level is ‘Scarlet.’ Minimum 30 ACT to be considered. </p>
<p>NEU-for gen. freshman scholarships, top 25% of applicants are ‘considered’ for merit awards including primarily stats based Dean’s of $5-25K/yr. So you need to determine where S falls in applicant pool. Universities often have ‘fact books’ or data listed in tables online in admissions or elsewhere. If not, look through their Common Data Sets when they are public, scrounge info from collegedata et al, or call/e-mail and ask. Collegedata suggests that 29 is break for lowest quartile of enrolled freshmen. Those numbers are generally higher for applicants than enrolled, so he definitely is in bottom quartile for tests. For grades, I don’t find the exact data as they left that blank on CDS, but over 60% enrolled are in top 10% of their class, so 3.5 GPA is probably also rather low for NEU. You can use this kind of info to evaluate chances of admission as well as scholarship chances.</p>
<p>NCSU has no specific guidelines for their stats merit awards, but according to collegedata, 27 is avg. enrolled and top quartile breaks at 29. 50% enrolled were in top 10%of class. Their CDS lists GPA ranges, but they include weighted, so not very informative. They give 75 freshmen engineering scholarships of $2-5K/yr, though didn’t try to find data on # of freshmen in program. In general, one can expect engineering applicants will have higher stats than the general applicant.</p>