Are you looking to get hundreds or thousands of dollars in college scholarships? Do you want to bring down that tuition bill because college seems stupidly expensive, but maybe your family makes too much to qualify for financial aid, or maybe the kind of colleges that you can get into aren’t the kind of colleges that meet 100% of demonstrated need? Either way, in this blog, I’m going to talk about merit scholarships and “chasing merit,” as some people like to say. I’m going to talk about what kind of statistics you want to have in order to be eligible for these scholarships. I’m also going to talk about where you can search for scholarships effectively and what to expect in terms of the landscape for merit in America in 2024 and beyond.
So, how do you play the merit game? News flash: It used to be that you could find full rides to a lot of schools. When I went to high school in Kansas, I was offered lots of money to go to the University of Kansas. They were throwing money at me. I just looked up their scholarship chart, and they’re not offering the same amount of money, automatically at least, as they were back when I went to college. So, the days of the full ride might not totally be as plentiful as they used to be. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of money out there to be had and that you shouldn’t be strategic about how you apply to colleges, whatever level you’re at.
Make Sure You Have a Strong SAT/ACT Score
One of the first things that I want to emphasize if you’re playing the merit game is to make sure that you have a really strong SAT or ACT score for you and don’t neglect to take these exams. Now, it varies school by school and region by region. Obviously, in California, the University of California system is totally test-blind. You can’t submit a test score even if you want to. At the same time, many scholarships are not test-optional, and many scholarships are going to give you a much better chance if you have a high score. Offhand, I have several students who’ve gotten full tuition scholarships to places like USC, Harvey Mudd, and Emory in the past several years, and all of them had 1550+ SAT scores. So, I would not deny the value of a good test score.
The other thing that I’ll say is on the other end of the spectrum because I’m not just going to talk about the top end of colleges and merit for the ethereal people who can get perfect scores on the test. I also want to talk about the fact that there is merit out there and there are merit grids at many, especially state institutions, where even a 17 or 18 sometimes on the ACT can qualify and get you on that merit grid depending on where you live and where you are. If you have an 18 on the ACT at Missouri in some categories, that can get you on the merit grid if you have a perfect GPA. And if you don’t have that test score, you don’t get onto the grid, and you can’t get that merit aid necessarily, or at least not automatically. So, I recommend that before you start the test prep process, you check out a lot of the schools that might be on your list and see what some of your options are going to be. I also always encourage students to go and check out your in-state flagship school. That is sometimes one of the best opportunities in terms of merit. You often get more money if you are in-state than out-of-state. Maybe the award isn’t as big, but because tuition was lower, you have to pay less money overall. And just to give you one last example of how powerful a test score can be, even if it’s not super high: in Louisiana, if you got five more points on your ACT with 40 hours of test prep, you might be able to earn over $340 an hour for your prep time, which is insane given the amount of scholarships that they offer. So especially in the southeast, but also regardless of who you are, I recommend that you really do the homework and figure this out because just a little bit more studying could be literal cash in your or your parents’ pockets.
For Big Money, Expect to Undermatch
Next up, for big money, expect to undermatch. I have this other video I made two years ago, and I encourage you to check it out if you really are gunning for a top university and you want that full tuition or really amazing aid. I know people don’t like to hear this; one of the best ways to get it is to go to a college whose average stats are lower than yours. You’ve got to be top of the pile. And how does that happen when you go to a school that maybe isn’t ranked in the top 100? And then if you’re at the top of the pile, you’re the one who’s going to be that 2% of students who get really good aid. So, how do you find those scholarships, or how do you even know where to start?
Where To Start Your Search
So the third thing I’m going to talk about is where you should start your search. One of my friends from the National Test Prep Association, an association of test prep tutors from across the nation and world, pinged me and said they created this website, and it’s really cool. So I want to share that with you, which is a website called meritaidgrids.com. If you’re in Georgia, make sure to check out Brian Eufinger of Edison Test Prep. Shout out to them. They do good test prep, and they have a lot of brick and mortar. And this is probably my favorite one of the resources I’m going to talk about today, and what I love about it is you don’t have to sell your soul. There’s no form you have to fill out. It’s just free information, which is awesome. So let’s say you want to go to school in Indiana. Just because it says no scholarships found for a university, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. It just means that it might not be listed on their site yet. They’ve got a lot of stuff in here, but it doesn’t mean it’s 100% comprehensive. It doesn’t mean Indiana University doesn’t have any merit aid. I know they do, especially for in-state students, because I tutored someone on the ACT a couple of years ago, and she got thousands of dollars more in scholarships after we went through private tutoring because she raised her score. Even if it was like three points, it was still worth it for her mom to pay us for private tutoring because it turned into a 5x investment. Just because it’s not on here doesn’t mean that you can’t double or triple your money. But you can click in and see different scholarships, and for some of them, you even get a grid. So in Louisiana, if you have an ACT score of 20, which is not that high, you can qualify for a top scholarship if you’re in-state. But even if you’re not going to go to Harvard, even if you’ve got a 3.5 GPA, you guys should be aware of the merit scholarship game and know what it is. Even if you’re not going to get a full ride, even if you’re not that kid, there are plenty of scholarships out there. So, there’s plenty of opportunity. And just because you don’t need it to get in doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to save your family a bundle. So, do your best on those tests.
There are other sites out there that you can search for scholarships. And these are big corporations, you guys. So again, they are in the data trade, most likely. Fast Web, Niche, Big Future, and Appily; I don’t have a preference on any of them in particular. I hate the idea of handing over my information, so I tend to work from available data and websites of universities.
The other thing that I like to do is look for lists. For example, you can look for full tuition scholarships, and scholarships.com has lists. And you don’t have to log in, and you don’t have to give away your soul to get to them. Now, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have been focusing so far on scholarships that come from institutions. Institutional scholarships are 95% of the money that’s out there for college. Very little money that goes into college is going to come from things like the Coca Cola Scholars Program, which is really hard to win, or the Flynn Scholars or Stamp Scholars or things like this. But you can also look up institutions with full tuition scholarships. You can look up lists and see if you can find lists online from consultants and people like that who might have them on their blogs. So there are some resources where you can check things out.
Merit is Not the Same as Cost of Attendance
Finally, last tip: merit is not the same as the cost of attendance. The real goal here is to save you money. If you got a $10,000 scholarship, but that school has a $90,000-a-year price tag, it doesn’t actually matter that much because a lot of schools cost $60,000 out the gate or $40,000 if you’re in-state. So make sure you don’t just think about the amount of the aid but also the total cost of attendance. And as I said before, state schools tend to be your best bet for merit scholarships. The other thing about state schools is their costs tend to be somewhat more controlled than some private universities. So overall, you can get an education at an affordable price compared to other options. I hope you guys enjoyed this blog and found out some more ways that you can search for merit scholarships!
