Merit scholarship tend to be one of the top three biggest scholarships available from colleges and universities. But what does merit mean when it comes to the academic world? Students will find out that once they start searching for colleges to send admissions to, they will most likely receive monetary gifts such as a university sending them a merit scholarship option.

What is the definition of a merit scholarship?

A merit-based scholarship is purely contributed on the students academic grades or excellent academic record rather than the financial-need based scholarships such as financial aid. Merit is the basis for grand scholarships that award outstanding student who have a 3.8 grade point average or a stellar 4.0 out of 4.0 on the grading United States scale. This grading scale differs from country to country.

Types of Merit Scholarships

Here is a short list of available merit scholarships that could easily be sent out to different academically excellent individuals:

• Coca Cola Scholarship Program
• American University National Achievement and National Merit Scholarship
• National National Eagle Scout Association STEM Scholarship
• Build the Future Merit Scholarship
• Elks Most Valuable Student Scholarship
• College JumpStart Scholarship
• Equitable Excellence Scholarship 
• Cameron Impact Scholarship

Merit scholarships are not only based in the United States, every country had their own form of automatic merit scholarship that finds a new student each year. High school students are considered the best participates when it comes to an academic merit funding opportunity. So high school students should start researching and seeing if they qualify immediately for any merit academic scholarships.

Merit scholarships will differ in subject study along with what that student could possibly do to prove that they will excel further by use of the given merit funding.

The Different Types of Merit

Believe it or not there are different types of merit. They are automatic, semi-automatic, competitive, national, or talent based. The automatic is a scholarship that is considered a full-ride scholarship gifted to a student. A semi-automatic is a 50% coverage scholarship that most likely covers a percentage of tuition and book fees. A competitive merit scholarship is one where there are many admissions to win that scholarship but only the best will be chosen to be rewarded. A national scholarship includes students who are involved in these programs: National African American Recognition Program, National Hispanic Recognition Program, National Indigenous Recognition Program and National Rural and Small Town Recognition Program.

The last one is the talent-based merit scholarship, which focuses on a specific talent that the student has based on their academic qualifications. This talent could reside in the similar sphere as a genius mathematician or a student that has possibly began to discover medicinal prosperities that have yet to be discovered before.

Students will be able to understand where they fall on the merit map. For example medical students do fall between competitive and automatic scholarships. It does depend on the study subject that the student is progressively excelling in that determines the route of which merit based scholarship will be sent to them.