c. The NROTC college/university selection and placement process
Before offering advice on the college/ university placement section, I will take a step back for a moment to familiarize you with how the whole process works. Scholarship selection boards for the Navy meet about a dozen or more times (depending on the total number of applications) throughout the year with the first board usually convening in late August/ early September. Marine Corps scholarship selection boards are held in November and February. Each board will review approximately 500 applications and they are reviewed in the order in which they are received. For this reason, you want to make every effort to have all of your application complete by early August so that you will be reviewed as early as possible. By August, there are usually 2,000 to 3,000 applications completed so if you’re just finishing in the September timeframe, you may not be reviewed until several months later. The selection board ―scores‖ all of the applications it reviews based on everything contained in the application and then selects the top hundred or so highest scoring applications. Those not selected are automatically rolled to the next board which would meet about a month later and select another hundred or so applications. In this manner, about 1,800 to 1,900 students will ultimately be selected over the course of the year (the last board meets in April) out of the roughly 8,000 to 10,000 that apply. This represents around a 20 percent acceptance rate, though it varies by year. Again, this is why you want to take the time to make your application as strong as possible. Once a board has chosen the hundred or so students it will select, those applications are then sent to a placement department which determines what college/ university NROTC unit each scholarship will be assigned to. Obviously, every effort is made to place a student where he/ she wants to go, but other factors do come into play. For example, each particular unit (there are roughly 70 total) has a certain ―quota‖ or max number of students that they can accept in a given year. NC State’s quota is usually 30. For us, this means that once 30 students have been placed in our unit and have accepted the scholarship offer, no additional students will be added here. If a 31st student was selected and their application went to placement, they may then be assigned to their number two, three, or four choice of school (again, depending on availability at that school). There are a few ―morals‖ to this story. First, it is very important that you actually apply to all of the five schools that you list on your scholarship application because it is possible that you may not be assigned to your first choice. Second, you want to have your application completed early (before the August board) so that you maximize your odds of being assigned to your first choice (because certain schools, like NC State, tend to fill up fast). Other things that affect placement include whether a certain school would be in-state or out-of-state for a particular student. As you might expect, this doesn’t apply to private schools like Duke, MIT, etc. where there is no difference in tuition and most students come from out-of-state. It does, however, apply to state schools like NC State, UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Virginia, etc. For these type of schools, the Navy requires that a minimum of 50 percent of students placed there come from within that particular state. It is for this reason that you will be required to place at least one state school on your list of five.