The National Merit Scholarship Corporation has announced over 800 additional winners of National Merit Scholarships financed by colleges and universities, including a scholar from Fayetteville.
Michael S. Hebert, of Fayetteville, was awarded the National Northeastern University Scholarship where he plans to study computer engineering. Founded in 1898, Northeastern University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts.
These Merit Scholar designees join approximately 3,000 other college-sponsored award recipients who were announced in June. Officials of each sponsor college selected their scholarship winners from among the Finalists in the National Merit Scholarship Program who will attend their institution.
College-sponsored awards provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship. This year, 176 colleges and universities are sponsoring more than 3,800 Merit Scholarship awards. Sponsor colleges include 99 private and 77 public institutions located in 45 states and the District of Columbia.
This final group of winners brings the number of 2016 National Merit Scholars to more than 7,300. These distinguished high school graduates will receive scholarships for undergraduate study worth a total of about $33 million. In addition to college-sponsored awards, two other types of National Merit Scholarships were offered — 2,500 National Merit $2500 Scholarships, for which all Finalists competed, and approximately 1,000 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards for Finalists who met criteria specified by their grantor organizations.
This year’s competition for National Merit Scholarships began when over 1.5 million juniors in some 22,000 high schools took the 2014 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. In September 2015, about 16,000 Semifinalists were named on a state-representational basis in numbers proportional to each state’s percentage of the national total of graduating high school seniors. Semifinalists were the highest-scoring program entrants in each state and represented less than one percent of the nation’s seniors.
To become a Finalist, each Semifinalist had to complete a detailed scholarship application, which included writing an essay, describing leadership positions and contributions in school and community activities, showing an outstanding academic record, and being endorsed and recommended by a high school official. Semifinalists also had to take the SAT and earn scores that confirmed their performance on the initial qualifying test. From the Semifinalist group, about 15,000 attained Finalist standing, and about half of the Finalists were chosen to receive National Merit Scholarships.
