Every fall, a version of the same advice circulates: get your scores up, and the money will follow. Merit scholarships are framed as the reward for a strong profile — the better your file, the more a college pays you to attend.
The colleges themselves publish whether that is true. Every year, in their Common Data Set, schools report how many first-year students received non-need-based scholarships and what the average award was. Those two numbers, read across schools, describe a landscape that looks nothing like the advice.
The most selective schools barely play
Harvard reported non-need merit awards to 4 first-year students. Princeton reported 44. Caltech, 9. UCLA, 9 — averaging $6,201 each.
These are not typos or partial years. They are the whole of it. At the top of the selectivity curve, merit aid is close to a rounding error, and the reason is a policy choice rather than an oversight: these schools spend their aid budget on demonstrated financial need instead. If your family qualifies, the discount can be enormous. If it doesn't, there is no second lever labeled "but my file is strong."
This matters for list building because it inverts a common assumption. At the schools students most want to impress, an outstanding profile buys admission consideration — it does not buy a discount.
One tier down, the money is real
Now look at schools a step below that tier:
- The University of Alabama: 2,942 first-year students received non-need awards, averaging $19,109
- Baylor University: 1,374 students, averaging $22,041
- Rochester Institute of Technology: 756 students, averaging $41,222
- Case Western Reserve University: 662 students, averaging $32,560
- DePauw University: 224 students, averaging $43,376
These are not small programs quietly handing out token amounts. Alabama's number means a substantial share of an entering class arrives with a discount attached. DePauw's average is larger than the total published price of many public universities.
The pattern behind it is straightforward. Schools that are selective but not at the very top compete for students who have options, and the currency of that competition is money. A file that is merely good at an Ivy is a file worth paying for here.
Two different price systems
Put those two observations together and a practical rule falls out. American colleges run two different systems for setting your price, and which one applies depends on where the school sits.
At the most selective schools, your price is set by your family's finances. Your profile determines whether you are admitted; your income determines what you pay. There is essentially no third variable.
Below that tier, your price is set partly by your profile. The same file that would be one of many at a top-ten school becomes a recruiting target — and the recruiting happens in dollars.
A list built entirely from the first group has no price flexibility in it at all. Whatever the aid formula says, that is the number. A list with a few schools from the second group has something the first list cannot have: the possibility that a strong application lowers the cost.
What to check before November
Two things are worth doing while lists are still moving.
First, look at whether the schools on your list report meaningful non-need awards at all. The figure is published; it is not a matter of asking around or reading forum speculation. A school reporting single-digit recipients is telling you, in advance, not to build a financial plan around merit money.
Second, watch the deadlines. Many of the schools with large merit programs tie consideration to an early application date — often the same November deadline as early action, sometimes earlier for competitive scholarship pools. Students who apply in January to a school with a generous merit program frequently find the scholarship consideration closed even though admission is not. That is a calendar problem, not an admissions one, and it is entirely avoidable.
The uncomfortable version
There is a version of this that is worth saying plainly, because it is the part the general advice avoids.
If your family will not qualify for need-based aid, and your list is entirely made of schools that give almost no merit aid, then you have built a list where every acceptance costs full price. That may be a fine outcome — plenty of families decide it is worth it. But it should be a decision, not a discovery made in April.
The alternative is not to abandon the reach schools. It is to make sure the list contains at least a few schools where a strong file is worth money, so that when the offers arrive, there is something to compare.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure above comes from the colleges' own Common Data Set filings, cross-checked against federal reporting through IPEDS and the College Scorecard. These are the same forms schools submit each year; they are public, and they are not estimates.
The reason to prefer them to any other source is simple: a school's own filing is the only place where "how many students got merit money and how much" is a reported fact rather than a marketing claim.
We built PrepToDone on those filings — every school on your list, priced and scored from published figures rather than guesses. You can run your own list free, in about two minutes, without an account.