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This year, 160 colleges and universities sponsored over 4,100 Merit Scholarship awards.
This final group of winners brings the number of 2021 National Merit Scholars to more than 7,500, worth a total of nearly $30 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 about 1,000 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards for finalists who met criteria specified by their grantor organizations.
The scholarship winners began their journey when over 1.5 million juniors at some 21,000 high schools took the 2019 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. That was whittled down to 17,000 semifinalists last fall. Semifinalists were the highest-scoring program entrants in each state and represented less than one percent of the nation s seniors.