O'Connell's Off Topic

Generous. I also donate to the OU Pride of Oklahoma Band, College of Business and Arts & Science. In addition to lots of tuition. It was money well spent. Our kids had a good experience. They like OU.

boomerball, I'm with you in terms of not putting as much emphasis on the national merit designation, but I am less concerned about missing out on a student like the one you mentioned and more worried about rewarding the student who is a good test taker but has less than stellar grades. If my understanding is correct (and things may have changed some in recent years, so I might be mistaken), a student who has an off day on the PSAT but comparably good SAT or ACT scores and good grades will be able to get a fairly similar financial aid package at OU since such a student would still get the OSRHE money and some additional OU scholarships (I'm less sure about this for out-of-state students, since I do not know if OU waves the out-of-state portion of the tuition for non-national merit scholars). There certainly are some really good students, though, that just miss the national merit and OSRHE cutoff who do not qualify for nearly as much in scholarship aid at OU (say, 30-31 ACT, 1400 SAT, 4.0 GPA). Those students may well get better offers from elsewhere. It would be nice to be able to do more for those excellent students, but there is only so much money to go around, and you have to start by awarding it to the top students. I don't know if OU does so, but I would not be opposed to offering a limited number of big scholarships to worthy students based on their total body of work, grades, test scores, extracurriculars, an interview, etc., without simply following a set standard. I also would be in favor of trying to provide more scholarship money to students already at OU who are earning top grades.