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.