About 2,500 National Merit Scholarships were awarded this week including two to students from Diamond Bar High School.

They are announced by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation and financed by U.S. colleges and universities. Officials of each sponsor college selected their scholarship winners from among the finalists in the 2014 National Merit Scholarship Program who plan to attend their institution.

These awards provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship.

An additional group of scholars will be announced in July, bringing the total number of college-sponsored Merit Scholarship recipients in the 2014 competition to about 4,500.

The Brahma recipients were:

• Corey Chen of Diamond Bar, Diamond Bar High School. His probable field is in electrical engineering. He was selected by USC.

• Daniel Z. Yang of Diamond Bar, Diamond Bar High, His probable career is in biology. He was selected by USC.

About 1.5 million juniors in some 22,000 high schools entered the 2014 National Merit Scholarship competition when they took the 2012 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which served as an initial screen of program entrants. Last fall, about 16,000 semifinalists were named in numbers proportional to each state’s percentage of the national total of graduating high school seniors.

Semifinalists were asked to submit a detailed scholarship application, which included writing an essay and providing information about extracurricular activities, awards, and leadership positions.

NMSC, a not-for-profit corporation that operates without government assistance, was established in 1955 to conduct the National Merit Scholarship Program.