The Updated Full Tuition/Full Ride Merit Scholarship List

This post was first published in September 2017. If you are reading this in 2019, the latest version of the list, version 7.1, was published on 3-13-2019. 

This past weekend, I released Full Scholarship List 4.0.  This is the latest full update to my list of full tuition and full ride merit scholarships. These are all “institutional” merit scholarships, meaning they are offered directly by the colleges.

I haven’t written a post for a couple months because I was focused on updating the scholarship list. It takes me over 100 hours of work (in my spare time) every time I do a full update.

When I do a full update (two times a year), I go back through each entry in the list to make sure the link to the page on the college’s website works, make sure all the merit scholarship details and eligibility criteria are still the same, and update anything that needs to be updated. I also check for additional full tuition and/or full ride merit scholarships on each college website while I am out there.

In doing this round of updates, I was disheartened to find that a number of colleges have stopped listing the scholarship amounts for their merit scholarships. For me, this means that I have to remove any scholarships listed from my spreadsheet since I can no longer validate that they are full tuition or full ride. For parents and potential students, this means that you can’t tell how much the school offers in merit scholarships.  You could ask the admissions office about the amounts of their merit scholarships, but you might get a very vague answer.

I also found a number of scholarships I had on the last version of the list had their amounts lowered so they were now less than full tuition. I usually keep anything on the list that’s about 70% of tuition or higher.

On the positive side, I did find 10 new scholarships to add to the list and will continue to search for more as I’m sure there are more full tuition and full ride scholarships out there that I haven’t found yet.

I am always excited when I can make improvements from the prior version of the Full Scholarship List.

Version 4.0 of the Full Scholarship List includes the following improvements:

• Column with full Residency Requirement details for the scholarship (I used to just list in-state or out-of-state, but many scholarships have more specific requirements than that)
• New column added for Eligibility Requirements – summarizes the main requirements so you don’t have to read through the Scholarship Details field to get this
• New column for Number of Awards – lists how many students receive a particular scholarship (if the school provides this information)

If you aren’t familiar with the Full Scholarship List, you can find the full details here. I provide information on what is included and even have a Frequently Asked Questions section at the bottom of the page.

Not that many students will qualify for Full Ride or Full Tuition scholarships, but my philosophy is that you don’t know what your student will qualify for unless you know what’s out there. If you want to find out what other institutional merit scholarships are out there for your student (not just Full Ride and Full Tuition), check out my subscription site, meritscholarshiplist.com.