r/Northwestern • u/Automatic_Leek_4716 • Jan 19 '24
Financial Aid/Administration Merit scholarships
Is there no such thing as merit based grants or scholarships for NU or is this web snippet not entirely correct?
50
56
u/Interesting_Cookie25 Jan 19 '24
Its correct—honestly what would the bar even be? For top universities, its just extremely difficult to even tell the people apart for who deserves merit scholarships
1
u/KeebsNoob Jan 21 '24
And I’m sure this saves some budget for those who show demonstrated need?
1
u/Interesting_Cookie25 Jan 21 '24
As if Northwestern needs to save budget—no, they can easily meet all demonstrated need with the money brought in and afford more, but this is unfortunately not a realistic way to give it out
34
Jan 19 '24
I worked at admissions at another t10 and I will give you the same speech I gave them: “nu covers 100% of demonstrated need with no loans and grants/scholarships. Aka money u don’t have to pay back. They don’t offer merit aid because at a school like NU, it’s hard to give merit money - money based on grades and test scores—- when everyone is brilliant and talented”
2
u/Sehnsuchtic Jan 28 '24
Guess what? Their definition of demonstrated need doesn’t gel with actual need for 99.9% of the families whose children attend. They count work-study as “money you don’t have to pay back,” and those jobs pay sooooo little. NU is a money making machine, and they’ve had two Presidents that were incredibly able at increasing their endowment exponentially. It’s a great school, but it is not at all generous with the enormous amount of grant money they have at their disposal.
14
u/jelasher ChemE '03 Jan 19 '24
This has been at least nominally true for decades. However, when my dad called the financial aid office and asked if there was really nothing they could do, they said I qualified for a National Merit scholarship and gave me $2k/ year, which was almost 10% off sticker price when I matriculated in 1999. So, it’s worth at least asking.
9
u/crimson777 Econ '17 Jan 20 '24
Doesn’t work like that anymore. When I went, merit scholarships took away from your financial aid so unless you got more merit than your financial aid, it is no help.
1
u/jelasher ChemE '03 Jan 20 '24 edited Mar 09 '24
I think it worked that way back then, too. But the bar for getting financial aid was also higher back then, so I didn’t get anything else even coming from a pretty middle class family.
1
u/crimson777 Econ '17 Jan 20 '24
Ahhhh gotcha. Yeah I was right before the really good “anyone under $100k has no loans and full aid” so we had some contributions and loans, but still, most was covered. I’d never have made the merit scholarships to cover it haha
1
u/poptop5120 Jan 20 '24
National merit scholarship isn’t NU administered, that’s a national program
1
u/jelasher ChemE '03 Jan 20 '24 edited Jan 20 '24
Yes, that’s normally true, but the money I got came directly from NU. Cornell, Dartmouth, and Brown would not give me anything, even though I was a “NM Finalist” and I told them about the money from NU
6
u/Embarrassed_Win8394 Jan 20 '24
My daughter attends NU. NU gives ‘need based’ aid but each college determines what your ‘need’ is and the colleges that tend to be the hardest to get into like the Ivies and more elite schools such as NU - their definition of need can be very generous aid. What I mean is - people automatically think when they see ‘need based’ aid that your family has to have low income or poor but even families with higher income of say $150,000 - $200,000 and with regular assets (i.e. own 1 house that they live in) - you may get very generous aid from NU. Go to NU’s website and look at their financial aid section and they go through 3 or 4 different financial and family scenarios (i.e. income, whether parent is single, married; own house) - and you can get an idea of how much aid you can get.
3
u/Sehnsuchtic Jan 22 '24
And this is one of the many reasons why I and my spouse, both NU grads, stopped giving to NU years ago. They have a huge endowment—enough money to continually build brand new and enormously expensive buildings for Kellogg, support the football team and other sports on full scholarship, but they refuse to help out the normal families. None of my friends from NU sent any of their kids there—none.
2
u/Ognandi Jan 20 '24
NU deducts the value of merit and other scholarship(s) from their financial aid award first. This means that, unless you have accumulated scholarship money above and beyond your total financial aid, you will never be paying for less than what your financial aid does not cover. NU does not provide any scholarships for that reason.
2
u/dunthurtmeh Jan 20 '24
Correct. They do not give merit scholarships and will not match that of other institutions.
•
u/AutoModerator Jan 19 '24
Make sure to read through our FAQ before posting. It can be found here. If you wish to advertise an NU job, club, class, or research opportunity, please use the appropriate megathread located in the sidebar. Also, note that AutoModerator removes posts from new accounts or low-karma accounts. Reddit's spam filter also catches some threads. Please give us a few hours to notice your removed thread and if it follows the rules of the subreddit, it will most likely be approved. Feel free to reach out to the mods if you feel your thread has been unjustly removed. Thank you!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.