10 Public Schools That Award Merit Aid to the Most Out-of-State Students

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College hopefuls whose families earn too much money to qualify for need-based financial aid but not enough to comfortably afford the cost of college often turn to schools that grant merit aid.

Merit aid is usually reserved for outstanding college applicants whose academic, athletic or artistic skills are well above the norm at a particular school. High-achieving high school seniors may be competitive for this type of scholarship or grant, especially if they apply to a safety school where their GPAs and standardized test scores are above the 75th percentile.

Such students may be particularly interested in schools that give the majority of out-of-state students merit aid.

Among the 340 ranked public schools in the 2022 Best Colleges rankings that reported this information to U.S. News in an annual survey, the average percentage of out-of-state undergraduate students who received non-need-based scholarship or grant aid in fall 2020 was 36.3%.

But among the 10 ranked public schools that provided the most out-of-state students merit aid, the average was 95.3%. Two schools – Purchase College—SUNY and California State University—Fresno – granted the highest proportion of out-of-state students merit aid at 100%.

The average merit aid award for out-of-state undergraduates at these 10 schools varied widely, ranging from $2,872 at California State University—Fresno to $19,780 at Winthrop University in South Carolina.

Three of the 10 schools are in Oklahoma, with one each in California, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, Ohio and South Carolina.

One of the 10 schools is a Regional College, an undergraduate-focused institution where most students focus on fields other than the liberal arts. Three are Regional Universities, which offer a full range of undergraduate programs and some master’s programs but few doctoral programs. Among the six remaining schools, half are National Liberal Arts Colleges, which emphasize undergraduate education and award a majority of their degrees in liberal arts fields, and the other half are National Universities, which focus on research and offer a wide array of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs.

When looking at all ranked public undergraduate institutions that reported merit aid data, the proportion of out-of-state students who received such aid ranged widely. For instance, at 232 of these schools, fewer than half of out-of-state students who enrolled in fall 2020 were awarded merit aid. At 138 of those institutions, fewer than a quarter of out-of-state undergraduate students received a merit scholarship.

At the same time, 104 public colleges and universities awarded merit aid to a majority of their out-of-state students.

In-state applicants often have a competitive advantage when vying for scholarship dollars at public schools, which are funded in part by local tax revenues and have a mandate to educate in-state residents. Nevertheless, many public schools recruit out-of-state students by offering them merit aid. The average merit award granted to out-of-state students at ranked public schools that reported this data to U.S. News was $8,886.

Below is a list of the 10 public institutions that offered merit aid to the greatest percentage of out-of-state undergrad students. Unranked schools, which did not meet certain criteria required by U.S. News to be numerically ranked, were not considered for this report.

U.S. News rank and category

Percentage of out-of-state students receiving merit aid