The 900 additional students receiving National Merit scholarships financed by U.S. colleges and universities included three recent graduates of Fayette County Public Schools, as announced July 17.
- Jan Balk of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, to Purdue University, with a probable career field of aerospace engineering;
- Alec Dupont of Henry Clay High School, to Auburn University, medicine; and
- Nisarg Patil of Dunbar, to Vanderbilt University, computer science.
They join some 3,200 recipients selected in June for these awards, which provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study. The 182 sponsoring colleges selected their recipients from among the National Merit finalists who plan to attend their school.
In total this year, about 7,500 graduating seniors earned National Merit scholarships worth more than $32 million. Recipients of the National Merit $2,500 awards were named in May and of the corporate-sponsored awards in April. All these students were deemed to have the strongest combination of accomplishments, skills, and potential for success in rigorous college studies.
About 1.6 million juniors in some 22,000 high schools entered the competition when they took the 2015 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. FCPS had 38 semifinalists among the group announced last fall.