xmhucpmc(Q): My son will go to college several years later. I'm wondering how can he get a full college scholarship. Hope some parents can share their experiences with us. Thanks!

goodparent(A): It's time to act now.

I really mean it!

One one hand, if you are a good applicant, many top-50 colleges will offer you merit-based scholarship, except a few (Harvard, MIT, Yale, etc.), only a few.

On the other hand, to make a strong candidate, a student has to "challenge himself" during 4 years of high school. If he always takes the easy way in high school, even if he always gets straight A's, a lot of top colleges will not even consider his application for admission, not to mention scholarship, according to some experts.

If you ask students and teachers in your high school, you'll know that there are easy classes and hard ones. Most high schools offer some college level (AP, advanced placement) classes. You child should take as many AP classes as possible, because colleges know which high school offers what AP classes.

Good colleges love top students, and they offer generous scholarships to attact them. I have see many students getting tuition waiver scholarships, some of them even get room-and-board scholarship, based purely on merit. As an example, my daughter got a tuition waiver that's worth $88k in 4 years, at that time.

Every good college offers need-based scholarship. I have a friend whose twin kids both got into Harvard, and one of them into Yale. They were offered full scholarships because they had very strong needs. Both parents were retired and had nearly no income. It doesn't have to be Harvard or Yale. Any good college will offer such scholarships. In this sense, it's like "no good students are left outside." The key is to be a really GOOD student.

Hope this helps.

BeLe(Q): Does it mean Harvard, Yale, MIT do not offer merit-based scholarship? Even for winners of important competitions such as Westinghouse, Intel Science Talent Search or various Olympic competitions?

goodparent(A): I know it sounds sily. But, these are the few top colleges in terms of popularity. They simply don't need to offer any incentive to attact top talents. Do they?

BeLe(Q): Indeed, this is unnatural to me.

Even these very few top universities fiercely competes against each
another for the best students. You might remember that the admission
officials from Princeton were reported to "illegally" enter Yale
computer to "steal" information about top incoming students.
Offering incentive will help attract some of the top students
from middle-class families.

One more thing. A few years ago, a faculty member from Brown told me
that there were virtually only two kinds of students in Brown: the very
rich and the very poor. Most of the middle class families could not
afford the expenses.

goodparent(A): So true.

In the US, elite colleges accept so-so students if their families donate large sum of money to support the colleges. This is an open secret. Many people in Europe look down at this practice as being unfair. However, US colleges argue that poor people would otherwise suffer more because they have to raise tuition for all and they would not be able to offer need-based scholarships.
Middle class is indeed the most unfortunate in this game. On one hand, they are too rich to get any need-based scholarship. On the other hand, some colleges offer no merit-based scholarship, yet, the tuition is sky-high.

xmhucpmc(Q): Talent help it?　（ｆｏｒ　ｅｘａｍｐｌｅ，　ｓｗｉｍｍｉｎｇ）

goodparent(A)：Many colleges offer sports scholarships. Ivy league schools have NO sports scholarship. For schools with sports scholarships, not every school offers swimming schorlarship.　You might want to look at NCAA swimming conference and see who the top 20 swimming colleges are. In all likelihood, they offer swimming scholarships ... :-)