Unfortunately it appears that renewable annual merit scholarships might not be renewed for a number of students:
U.S.News & World Report - Education,
5 Big Financial Aid Lies, by Kim Clark, April 6, 2010
5. "Renewable" merit scholarships: Most schools and organizations tell scholarship winners the rules they'll need to follow and grades they'll need to achieve to renew their scholarships in future years. But only a few organizations give prospective, and, all too often, overconfident, students any statistics or warning of the odds of their receiving merit scholarships for all four years.[/i ... some schools have set much higher and tougher hurdles—GPAs of 3.5, or even 3.8—for other merit scholarships, and [i]don't always warn the winners about previous recipients' records of achieving those kinds of grades over four years.
Law schools have been doing this sort of thing for a while, too. I see it as being the educational equivalent of a bait-and-switch routine. The colleges know that a big chunk of merit scholarship kids will lose the funding and become revenue sources who will be reluctant to pull out of the college.
The financial aid people should be obligated to tell the kids not only what percentage of scholarships are lost at the end of each year (x% of ending freshmen, etc,) but also what's required on average to retain the required GPA --- by subject area. So that might be, "40+ hours a week outside of 20 hours of classes classes and labs for STEM, 30+ for humanities outside of class time, etc. And if you major in theater, prepare to sacrifice many weekends working as an unpaid lighting/sound/backstage lackey during dress rehearsals and performance days and nights."
