與其他答復提供了一些不同的觀點：

First you have to think about what exactly you mean by average students and get full-ride. Average means different things to different people and by get full-ride, do you mean the top schools, or any school, or something in between? For a given university the full ride scholarships will only go to the top students, and certain particular groups of students that they explicitly want to target like certain minorities. What a top student looks like for one university can be vastly different from another university. In general if you truly in the dead center of the U.S. population you will probably not get a full ride anywhere unless you happen to belong to a small group that some university wants to target for other reasons. But depending on the school you are looking at the standards for getting the scholarships may not be so lofty as you might imagine though certainly they are not just giving them to anybody.

出售自己時要小心。 例如，一個在競爭激烈的高中中排名前30位并且SAT分數達到1250位前20位的學生可能會認為自己是平均水平，因為他們有很多朋友做得更好。 但實際上，這個學生絕對高于平均水平。 在哈佛甚至伊利諾伊州大學獲得重大獎學金可能是不可能的。 但是，如果有許多課外活動和其他一些努力工作和良好品格的證據，對于一些較小的學校來說，這可能不是沒有問題。 即使不是一個完整的旅程，也許仍然足以使它值得。

Of course, there is a practical aspect that comes into play for many students. Let’s say your résumé qualifies you to get into great schools A, B, and C; gets you a modest scholarship at pretty good schools J, K, and L; and gets you a full-ride at average schools X, Y, and Z. What are you going to do? If you have no resources at all, your only option is X, Y, or Z. But if you have at least some resources, you are probably going to target at least J, K, or L, and maybe A, B, or C. So what happens for a lot of students is that it is not always about whether they might be able to get a fat scholarship somewhere, but whether they are willing to settle for the schools that might give them the fat scholarship.