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ASU continues funding national scholars


ASU will continue to award scholarships to high-quality students, an official said days after the University of Texas at Austin announced it would no longer participate in the national scholars program.

Mark Jacobs, dean of Barrett, the Honors College, said on Tuesday that preliminary numbers indicate that ASU enrolled 160 National Merit Scholars this semester as well as more than 100 National Hispanic and National Achievement Scholars.

The scholarship awarded to these students is worth $60,000 over four years.

"The provost, the president and I all feel that we want to welcome good students of all sorts to ASU,” Jacobs said. “One of the tools we have are the national scholarships and that’s why we don’t want to give them up.”

UT decided to end its program due to financial constraints on the university and the need for financial aid for more UT students, not just national scholars, said Tom Melecki, director of Student Financial Services at UT.

“It just required us to redirect some of our resources to make sure that UT stays successful to all students who are qualified to attend UT, regardless of the ability of those students to pay,” Melecki said.

He said UT, which enrolled more than 240 National Merit Scholars this year, according to preliminary numbers, will continue to fund students it has already committed to, but has chosen to redirect the $4.4 million it was using annually for national scholars to need-based scholarships.

“The quality of our student body we believe is pretty high, and we think there’s a lot of merit out there among all of our students,” Melecki said. “We want to just make sure that other students who may not be national merit scholars don’t face the problem of not being able to afford to go to UT simply because they can’t get need-based aid.”

But Jacobs said his experiences have shown him that increasing the amount of money given to national scholars increases the amount of national scholars a university will enroll.

“There are a lot of families out there that respond in their college choices to [the] size of scholarship given. … Of course even more of them think that way during a recession,” Jacobs said. “If you want National Scholars, you pay for them, and if you don’t pay for them, you don’t get them.”

Freshman political science major John Sullivan, a National Merit Finalist, said he would not be at ASU if he didn’t have a scholarship.

“The National Merit Scholarship is one of the major effects that brought me to ASU, so I think by eliminating the program they would lose a lot of good students,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan said future national scholars who would have gone to UT may now consider ASU instead.

“I’m sure that if they’re not getting any scholarship from UT, they’ll look for other scholarship opportunities elsewhere,” he said. “The economy is not great, so a lot of kids are looking for scholarships.”

Jacobs said that while he doesn’t think national scholars are the only quality students at ASU, he does think they are great students.

“They achieve great things while they’re here, and they do help — the way other good students in a class would — to raise the whole level of the class discussion,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs, who recruits national scholars to ASU, said that after hearing about UT’s decision to leave the program, he may pay a little more attention to Texas students this year.

“I do go to Texas recruiting, and it has not escaped me that I might be more successful [there this] year,” Jacobs said.

Reach the reporter at snrodri2@asu.edu.


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