My scary-smart son learned yesterday he is a National Merit Scholar semifinalist. He is a junior in high school. We already know he is super smart.
What are the practical implications of being a National Merit Scholar? I understand juniors can only be semi-finalists, and that you can be a finalist only once you are a senior. Does this mean schools start chasing after him? Does this make getting into certain colleges easier? Or is this a self-serving designation, like being in Whos Who of College Students?
He wants to major in physics, minor in history. He is interested in Bard, St John’s Anapolis, Haverford, and MIT.
The designation, at least when I was in high school, is based on your score on the National Merit Scholastic Qualifying Test. In my school, this was also the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, so we called it the PSAT/NMSQT (p-sat nimsquat).
I think the top couple of % of test-takers become semi-finalists. I think there were a handful in my class of 250 students. IIRC, the top .5% eventually became finalists (I was the only one in my class). The benefits of being a finalist included:
– a small scholarship. I think it was $1500 or $2000 (not huge)
– I got to put “National Merit Scholar” on all my college applications. This was probably the biggest advantage.
So, it really means that you performed super-well one day on one multiple choice test. I never considered it a huge deal, and I don’t know how seriously college acceptance boards take it, but it is an actual accomplishment to be proud of (unlike the Who’s Who thing).
As I understand it, you are a “semi-finalist” until you actually get an award for it. Some awards are sponsored by corporations and such, but the vast majority are awarded by the college that the semi-finalist attends.
Not every college offers National Merit awards. Any semi-finalist who attends such a school will never “become” a finalist, although this doesn’t mean his/her scores are any poorer than the ones who are finalists. It has to do with the school, not the student. It’s kind of an odd system.
The realistic advantage for me was seeing an increased interest from colleges my senior year. And the one I went to gave me a free ride my first year because of it.
Semi-finalist doesn’t have any actual value, other than adding another line to his awards & honors list on his college application. If he actually becomes a National Merit Scholar, as mentioned above, there is a financial component.
I also got a fee-waived application to my first-choice college, which saved me (IIRC) $25.
Advantage: scholarships. But with one caveat: apply to generous schools.
(and notify them of your results … I think you can tell the College Board folks to notify certain schools of your achievements)
I applied to American University. They offered me zero incentives. It would have been $21,000 tuition.
I also applied to Penn State. They gave me a $750/yr National Merrit Scholarship (paid for books, basically), plus two half-tuition scholarships (one from my chosen college, one from the Honors program, in which I enrolled). All we had to pay for was room and board.
In short–if you choose schools well, a young geek can milk a lot of money from the system.
Also a NMS. As mentioned, it depends on the school. For some, it’s just another outstanding achievement that gives your son another leg-up over the competition. Other schools might give you lots and lots and lots of money… the University of Oklahoma will give in-state students a completely free ride, including room and board, books, fees, and a $375/semester stipend. Out-of-state students get a deal almost that good, and for these reasons OU currently boasts more NMS’s per capita than any other public university.
Shop around and see what you’re offered compared with what you can afford, weighted against whatever universities you and your son think best suit him. But anywhere he chooses to go, being a NMS will attract significant attention. There are many public high schools that can count the number of NMS’s they’ve graduated in the past decade on one hand…
Incidentally, the process for getting to the finalist stage his senior year will primarily involve two things: taking the SAT to support the score he got on the PSAT/NMSQT, and an application that will look at his high-school transcript, as well as extra-curricular activities and such. I also believe there’s a short essay to write, I hardly remember anymore.
Oh, and don’t forget that being a semifinalist entitles you to fill out loads of extra forms and to write an essay, in order to move up to finalist and/or National Merit Scholar.
It’s all worth it. It definitely gets more interest from colleges. Unfortunately, my small HS had a lousy guidance counselor, and he didn’t advise me about any of the school incentives. I and my family were clueless, so I went to a state school that gave no additional help based on my NMS status. But I did get the $1000 from the National Merit Foundation.
I was one of them things or another (semifinalist, I think) and the practical upshot of it was that I got a lot of mail. I did get some pretty lucrative offers (one school sent me an offer of full tuition, room, and board before they even sent an application) but nothing of connsequence from any of the schools I was interested in. I did, of course, add the extra line to my college applications, but it’s impossible to judge how much, if any, effect that had on which schools accepted me.
You really need to deal with this on a college-by-college basis. Check the webpages for the schools he’s interested in to see if they say what they’re looking for, and if you can’t find the info there, e-mail or call someone in the admissions departments. Your high school guidance counsellor might also have more information.
What it means is that you will get a lot of junk mail from colleges in the coming months. I was a National Merit Commended Scholar, which I think is one tier under Semifinalist. The junk mail just poured in. So many trees died just because I happened to do well on a test…
Other than that, it was just one more thing to put on a college application. Only the National Merit Finalists actually get National Merit Scholarships. My husband got one of those from the University of Minnesota, and it was nice–I think it was $1500/year for four years. I was able to get a Presidential Scholarship, which was $1000/year for two years…not bad. I’m sure that the Commended Scholar thing didn’t hurt in getting that.
It’s not just colleges that give out National Merit Scholarships. I would have been eligible to apply for one from my father’s union had I been a Finalist.
I was a National Merit Finalist (or Scholar, whichever the highest one is). The advantages I got from it were:
[ul]
[li]$2000 from the National Merit People[/li][li]Many acceptance letters from colleges I’d never heard of, hadn’t applied to, and had no intention of going to.[/li][li]A lovely list of companies that, had my parents worked for any of them, would have given me additional money.[/li][/ul]
It may have also helped to get me into the school I wanted. I don’t know for sure.
Also, (shameless plug), suggest that your son take a look at Harvey Mudd College. Before I had heard of it, I was dead set on going to MIT or Caltech, but it turned out that Mudd was more what I wanted. And, with our association with the Claremont Colleges, he could get a great Physics education here and take history classes at any of the colleges.
Course, all the schools you mentioned are on the East Coast, so he may not even be interested in SoCal.
Another semi-finalist here. It got me some notice from colleges, a nice title on the application, and probably made it somewhat easier to get in on Early Decision. Until you’re a finalist, it doesn’t mean squat in terms of money, but it’s cool to impress people.
You guys must live on the wrong state or wrong decade. In Texas (at least 20 years ago, yikes I’m old), it got me a full ride 4-year scholarship offer from pretty much every state school [UT, A&M, Tech] and several private schools). I chose A&M and never paid a penny. Of course, this may be more closely related to the fact that I was 6’8" and was on the HS state championship BB team ;-).
Hint to all HS athletes: You probably have a future in engineering and you probably don’t in professional sports. Study hard.
I qualified as a semi-finalist after taking my PSAT, and like most semi-finalists, qualified as a finalist after sending in my application and scoring reasonably well on the SAT. Going from semi-finalist to finalist was really more of a confirmation process than an elimination; they want to make sure you’re serious about college, and that your PSAT scores were not a fluke. Out of the 15,000 semifinalists during the year I took the PSAT, I think about 13,500 moved on to be finalists.
As a finalist, you become eligible for National Merit scholarships; about half of finalists will become National Merit Scholars. (I didn’t.) However, your status as a finalist may qualify you to receive other scholarships from individual colleges/universities/organizations; in my case, it was a cool $2000 from the University of Wisconsin.
Yet another National Merit Finalist. I would have gotten the scholarship, but I didn’t need it. Indirectly, though, I got a state scholarship for being a NMF.
The award itself is hardly worth anything; something like $1500 spread across your first two semesters. I don’t know why, but it’s different for different students. Never more than $2500 though, IIRC. However, as mentioned before, it does bring in the junk mail and scholarship offers.
I got $1000.00/year from my state school. But that was back in the 1970s when $1000.00/year was a big deal. Cut my college-going costs roughly in half. So basically, $4000.00 for 2 1/2 hours work. I haven’t gotten a pay day like that since
National Merit Finalist checking in. It could have gotten me $2000 for my freshman year from my chosen school (NYU), but since they’d already offered me a full tuition Trustee Scholarship, they would have just subtracted it from what I’d already been offered. Plus the Trustee Scholarship was guaranteed to remain at the same level for all 4 years of undergrad, and the NMS was only for freshman year, so I refused it.
Another ditto on the junk mail. I was getting some really funny promo brochures, like one on “Women in the Liberal Arts at MIT.”
