A student will typically only get meaningful academic money if they are attending a school which is below their academic potential. Virtually none of the top academic schools give any academic money.
While it is certainly true that many of the top academic institutions (Top 20) have severely curtailed their academic scholarships in favor of augmenting their financial aid programs, the amount of assistance provided overall has slightly increased over the last decade. Due to the economic downturn, many institutions were facing student populations already on campus that experienced financial hardships - parents losing jobs, external scholarship sources being cut, and similar stories. This caused a shifting of resources at many schools in order to preserve enrollment levels at the cost of some entering freshmen.
That said, there are still wonderful schools across the Top 50 in US News and World Reports that offer healthy academic scholarships. We encourage you to consider the Patriot League schools where Bucknell, Lafayette, and Lehigh will offer academic discounts nearing 40% ($20,000 per year and more) for top academic candidates (Top 10% of their High School classes).
These shifting resources, including the 28 national universities offering true need-blind admissions programs, are creating an unintended effect - the so-called BARBELL or DOUBLE BUBBLE in admissions. Here, we are seeing a middle-class squeeze where the parents are financially capable of paying full-freight for their students according to paper calculations, but unwilling to do so as the hardships would be too great.
This Double Bubble (lower income students can attend on financial aid and higher income students can attend on their own payments) has become a major concern at many universities and represents one of the biggest risks to private collegiate education.
