Hi! I am a national merit finalist and recently I got mail from UTD and UA about my finalist standing. They say I can get free college and free rooms and stipends and fees for books and international money. At the same time, I got deferred from Columbia University in December and I am waiting for Columbia, UPenn, Carnegie Mellon, Emory, and Vanderbilt at the end of March. To get the benefits for UTD or UA I have to designate one of them as my first choice school in national merit before march 1, which is before my prestigious school decisions come out. I have a better chance at Columbia (my dream school) with Finalist first choice and also will probably get more money if I get in. Should I designate UA or UTD as my first choice under national merit or wait?
Also I didn’t even apply to UTD and UA and I got mail saying I can get all this free stuff. And I saw that the deadline was over. I don’t know if I can still get the benefits.
There’s a very good possibility of getting rejected from all of the prestigious schools listed. If you manage to get in, there’s a good possibility you won’t be able to afford them anyway. If you could, you wouldn’t even be considering a scholarship in the first place. Private schools cater to the wealthy, not the brilliant. If they wrote-off $200k for every student that can’t afford it, they go bankrupt before the end of the semester. Don’t hold your breath on generous financial aid.
You have 2 full ride scholarships. I would say take it and run. UT-Dallas is a great school, though it’s a boring and nerdy commuter school with zero school spirit. Alabama is a thriving traditional university with lots of school spirit.
What would be the net price at each college, and are these net prices affordable? Note that Columbia does not offer merit money, so the NM benefit would be just the $2.5k (or whatever the small amount is) from the NM company.
Find out if Columbia defers only borderline applicants or if it defers almost all non-admitted early applicants. If the latter, your chances there appear smaller.
Call both Alabama and UTD to see if their app deadlines have passed. Also, I know for sure you do not have to designate Alabama as your first choice until May 1, because my D20 applied there and we just got an email reminding us of their deadline for first choice designation. I’m not sure when you would need to designate UTD as your first choice (my D20 did not apply there), but I would be surprised if it was March 1. Talk to them.
Another option is UCF, which is still accepting applications but their deadline for Honors College apps is March 31, so you would need to apply soon. They offer the Benacquisto for NMFs, which is also a full ride.
@coolguy40 Columbia, UPenn and Vanderbilt are need blind and meet need if finances qualify.
Yes, did you do the NPC on your colleges?
Congrats on the full tuition offers, hope the dates haven’t passed. Good luck. And agree, the Florida colleges generous for Merit Scholars.
Thanks for the replies. As for the Columbia question, Deferred students make up around 25% of the ED pool and the acceptance rate is like 7% in RD. So I think the best I can do is wait till the end of march to get the decisions from the prestigious schools, then designate my first choice as necessary. I have applied to University of Alabama now.
Columbia doesn’t give weight to being a NMF. Not does UPenn. Some of your other schools might but I do not know which ones do. You can call admissions of each school and ask but getting a definitive answer is going to be difficult. Likely, they’ll all say it has some impact.
Yes , you can only designate one school as your top choice on March 1 and schools that track this sort of thing will know if you did not designate them as such. Again, it’s not possible any way I know to measure the benefit/detriment of this policy. I can just say that I know NMF who were accepted at any of the schools you mentioned despite not designating them as first choice and I also know plenty of Scholars who did not get accepted to their first choice schools despite the first choice designation.
I’d apply to UTD and UA ASAP if you are serious about accepting a NMS award from them. I’d also check out other schools you might have missed with generous awards for Scholars. You usually have until until well after the decision date of colleges to change first choice designation and these schools allow for that. Whether you’ve met admission application deadlines or not at individual schools is a different matter. You need to investigate this school by school.