Luka H. Mikek, a recent Crawfordsville High School graduate, was named a recipient of a college-sponsored merit scholarship by the National Merit Scholarship Corp. The NMSC announced Wednesday more than 3,300 winners of National Merit Scholarships financed by U.S. colleges and universities.
Mikek received the National Merit Grinnell College Scholarship. His probable career field is chemistry.
Grinnell is is coeducational, nonsectarian and privately endowed and supported with an enrollment of 1,200. The first four-year college west of the Mississippi River, Grinnell is nationally known for its outstanding faculty and student body. The liberal arts curriculum is offered on a largely elective basis, students having responsibility for planning their own courses of study with the help of faculty advisers. Emphasis is placed on hard work, excellence in scholarship and personal enjoyment.
Officials of each sponsor college select their scholarship winners from among the Finalists in the 2020 National Merit Scholarship Program who plan to attend their institution. These awards provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship. An additional group of Scholars will be announced in July, bringing the total number of college-sponsored Merit Scholarship recipients in the 2020 competition to about 4,100.
This year, 167 higher education institutions are underwriting meritscholarship awards through the National Merit Scholarship program. Sponsor colleges and universities include 92 private and 75 public institutions located in 43 states and the District of Columbia.
College-sponsored merit scholarship winners announced Wednesday are a part of the distinguished group of about 7,600 high school seniors who will receive National Merit Scholarships for college undergraduate study worth over $30 million. Earlier this spring, NMSC announced winners of corporate-sponsored merit scholarship awards and national merit $2,500 scholarships.
More than 1.5 million juniors in approximately 21,000 high schools entered the 2020 National Merit Scholarship program when they took the 2018 preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. Last fall, approximately 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 compete for merit scholarship awards, semifinalists first had to advance to the finalist level of the competition by fulfilling additional requirements. Each Semifinalist was asked to submit a detailed scholarship application, which included writing an essay and providing information about extracurricular activities, awards, and leadership positions. Semifinalists also had to have an outstanding academic record, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, and earn SAT or ACT scores that confirmed the qualifying test performance.
From the semifinalist group, some 15,000 met requirements for finalist standing, and about half of thefinalists will be merit scholarship winners in 2020.
NMSC, a not-for-profit corporation that operates without government assistance, was established in 1955 to conduct the National Merit Scholarship program. The majority of National Merit Scholarships provided each year are made possible by the support of approximately 400 independent corporate and college sponsors. These sponsors join NMSC in its efforts to enhance educational opportunities for America’s scholastically talented youth and to encourage the pursuit of academic excellence.
