Why Most Colleges Publish No Merit Grid (2,117 of 2,432 Checked)

MeritChart's dataset covers 315 colleges. That number is sometimes read as a small sample. It is not a sample — it is what is left after checking the full universe. We checked 2,432 four-year colleges against their own official pages. 2,117 of them publish no verifiable automatic merit grid: no published chart that ties an exact dollar amount to published GPA or test criteria a family can check before applying.

The other 315 are the colleges in our data — 97 classified guaranteed automatic and 218 classified automatic consideration. This post is about the 2,117, and about the specific, documented reasons their pages did not produce a grid. Every reason quoted below is the exact wording recorded in our checked-none log when the college was checked on 2026-11-02. Our standard for what counts as a grid is set out on the methodology page.

What the checked-none log actually says

Named examples, with the reason recorded for each:

Auburn University — Official chart is explicitly a competitive-merit guide, not a guarantee
Florida State University — Vires/Mores awards are competitive; no published automatic thresholds
Louisiana State University — Holistic review; ranges only
Arizona State University (freshman) — No published fixed freshman grid — estimator only (the published nonresident transfer grid IS included in colleges.json)
University of Arizona — No public grid of amounts
Florida International University — No published thresholds; awards expressed as ranges / percentage of tuition; funding limited, not guaranteed
South Dakota State University — Jackrabbit Guarantee benchmarks exist and the official catalog confirms a $1,000 minimum, but per-tier dollar amounts are not published on official pages (only a $1,000–$4,000 range)
Fort Hays State University — Per-tier thresholds exist only as a graph image / interactive estimator on fhsu.edu; official text publishes only program totals (re-checked 2026-11-02)

Note the Arizona State entry, because it shows how the log is kept. Its freshman merit is estimator-only, so there is no freshman grid to record — but its published nonresident transfer grid is a real grid, and that grid is in our dataset, on the Arizona State University page. A college is excluded for the program checked, not written off wholesale. The other colleges named above have no grid-based page in our dataset; the full index of colleges that do is at /colleges/.

The four patterns behind most exclusions

The 2,117 exclusions are not 2,117 different stories. Reading the log, they cluster into a small number of patterns:

Competitive awards. The college offers merit money, but a committee or a competitive review decides who receives it. Auburn's chart calls itself a competitive guide; Florida State's named awards are competitive with no published automatic thresholds. A student can be strong enough to hope and still have no published number to plan on.
Holistic review. The college weighs the whole application and publishes, at most, what past recipients looked like. Louisiana State is recorded as holistic review with ranges only. Typical-recipient profiles describe other students; they do not commit anything to yours.
Ranges only. The college publishes a span — South Dakota State's $1,000–$4,000 is the cleanest example in the log — without tying specific amounts to specific credentials. A range cannot be budgeted. The distance between the bottom and the top of a published range is exactly the number a family needs, and it is the number the college has not published.
Estimator only. The college offers an online calculator or an interactive chart instead of a published grid. Arizona State's freshman merit works this way, and Fort Hays State's per-tier thresholds exist only inside a graph image and interactive estimator. An estimator produces an individual indication on the college's terms; it does not publish criteria and amounts that a family — or a dataset — can verify independently.

Some colleges combine patterns: competitive and funding-limited, holistic and ranges-only. The log records the reason that applied to each college's own pages, in the words above, rather than forcing one label onto all of them.

What no grid means for a family

It means one specific thing: there is no way to know your number before applying. The college may award your student generously. It may award nothing. Both outcomes are consistent with everything the college has published, because it has published no criteria tied to an amount.

That uncertainty has a practical consequence for how a college list should be built:

Colleges with published grids can be priced before applications are written — run them through the free calculator and compare estimated remaining cost, college by college
Colleges without grids belong on a list for fit, programs, or other reasons — with merit treated as unknown, and the budget built as if the award were zero until an offer letter says otherwise
A range, a typical-recipient profile, or an estimator result should never be entered into a family budget as if it were a grid figure

None of this says the 2,117 are ungenerous. Some award substantial merit money through competitive or holistic processes. It says their generosity cannot be verified in advance from their own published criteria — and a college plan built on unverifiable money is a hope, not a plan. The 315 colleges with published grids are where the plan can start.