With some private college costs now approaching $85K per year, it’s no surprise families react with sticker shock. But academically strong students can cut their costs through merit scholarships. In this post, I focus upon the biggest source of merit scholarships, those given by the colleges themselves.
I define merit scholarships as ones that do not consider financial need. This post is for “donut hole” families, who make too much to receive much aid, but are unable to pay what colleges ask from them.
They Want You!
Colleges offer merit money in order to attract high-achieving students. These students are likely to be admitted to, and would otherwise choose, more prestigious colleges. Going back to my definition of the six tiers of college selectivity, to get a merit scholarship a student will typically need to drop down a tier or two in college selectivity. For example, a student accepted into a tier S1 college, like Stanford, is likely to get merit money from a tier S3 college, like USC.
The colleges offering merit money do so because they want a cohort of top-notch students that can learn from each other and elevate the classroom discussion. After college, they expect these students to succeed in the workplace, helping improve the college’s overall academic reputation.
Who Offers Money
Not all colleges offer merit money. For example, none of the Ivy League colleges do, nor do Stanford and MIT. They believe they get plenty of excellent students without needing to offer any further enticements.
But plenty of colleges do offer merit scholarships, including some very selective ones. Duke offers a number of full-ride scholarships to students that might otherwise choose a college like Harvard. Vanderbilt offers around 250 full-tuition scholarships. And a majority of state flagships offer full-tuition scholarships to their strongest students. To make finding those scholarships easy, I have created a spreadsheet showing the merit opportunities from over 100 of the top colleges in the USA.
You will see that some of the most generous scholarships are offered to students who make National Merit through strong performance on the PSAT. National Merit scholarships are most often given by public universities to state residents. But there are also private colleges that reward National Merit, as well as public universities that offer these scholarships to out-of-state students.
Some notable non-restrictive National Merit scholarships are the following:
- Alabama: Offers full-ride for both in-state and out-of-state students.
- Fordham: Offers-full tuition
- Idaho: Offers full-ride
- Mississippi: Offers full-ride
- New Jersey Institute of Technology: Offers full-tuition
- Oklahoma: Offers more than full-tuition
- Tulsa: Offers full-ride
- USC: Offers half-tuition for National Merit
Don’t Forget Need-Based Aid
Note that while my focus here is on merit scholarships, I am not disparaging the colleges that provide only provide need-based financial aid based. Some colleges are extremely generous with financial aid, and for many families might actually be the lowest cost option. Always check your family’s cost using the college’s Net Price Calculator.
