Academy Awards mean Academic Awards at RIT

This is the time of year when we review prospective freshmen academic records and award thousands of merit scholarships. This has been going on for a couple of weeks and we hope to wrap things up by the end of the week. So, that means lots of letters will be going out this week! These scholarships include the Presidential, Achievement, National Merit, National Achievement, National Hispanic Scholars, National Co-op, Project Lead The Way, and SAE Engineering.

Each applicant accepted by RIT is evaluated for a merit scholarship. In general, we look at SAT scores, rank in class and demonstrated special talents or abilities. Congratulations to all of you who are awarded a merit scholarship by RIT!

At the same time, we are getting ready to send financial aid awards to FAFSA filers. We’ve been busy getting print materials ready to enclose with financial aid awards, loading FAFSAs, and testing software to be sure that awards are calculated correctly. Late last week, we received the Federal Pell grant amounts based on the new stimulus bill. The maximum Pell grant will increase to $5,350 from $4,710. This is really good news for our Pell eligible students.

And, we’re still assisting our current students. Although, this is break week we’re still helping our students get ready for spring quarter and reapply for financial aid for the upcoming year which begins with the summer quarter.