I get some version of this question every fall: my scout needs Citizenship in the Nation or Personal Management, nobody in the troop is registered to counsel it, what do we do? For years my answer was the same — check if a nearby university or council is running a merit badge college. Half the time the parent had never heard the term. The other half, they'd heard it called something else entirely and didn't realize it was the same thing.
It's the same event with five different names
This is the part that trips people up more than anything else about the actual event. Depending on your council, the exact same format — a bunch of registered counselors in one building, teaching a full day of badge classes — gets called a Merit Badge College, a Merit Badge University, a Merit Badge Weekend, a Merit Badge Powwow, a Merit Badge Midway, a Merit Badge Blitz, or a Merit Badge Skill Center. I've had parents search "merit badge college near me," find nothing, and give up, when their council had a Merit Badge Midway on the calendar the whole time under a name they never thought to search.
If you're hunting for one, search all the variants, and don't stop at your own council's site. A lot of these events are open to outside scouts, and a neighboring council's event might land on a weekend that actually works for your family.
The mistake I see every single time
Prerequisites. Every class flyer lists them, usually in bold, and a scout who shows up without having done them is going to spend the day sitting in a room with everyone else while the counselor teaches material he's not positioned to absorb. I've watched a scout get halfway through a robotics session and realize he was supposed to bring a completed project he'd never heard about. It's not the counselor's fault and it's not really the scout's fault either — it's a communication gap between the flyer and whoever signed the scout up.
Now, before any scout in my troop registers for one of these, I ask them to read the prerequisites out loud to me. Not skim — read. It takes two minutes and it's saved more than one weekend.
What I tell parents to actually expect
- Your scout probably won't finish every badge completely. A partial is normal, not a failure — the counselor signs off on what's done and your scout finishes the rest with a counselor back home.
- Bring the blue cards or the Scout Handbook, whichever the event asks for, and whatever else the flyer specifically calls out.
- Popular badges — robotics, space exploration, anything career-flavored — fill up fast. If your scout has a badge they actually want, register the day it opens.
- Talk to your Scoutmaster before picking classes. Some troops want input on which badges a scout takes on, especially the Eagle-required ones.
One more thing worth saying plainly: these events run on each council's own calendar, and that calendar changes every year. If you find a list of past events, treat it as a starting point, not a schedule. Scouting America's official council locator is the most reliable way to confirm which council you actually belong to before you go hunting for what they've got on the calendar this year.
I put together a fuller guide with the naming variants, a pre-registration checklist, and a step-by-step on finding one near you — it's the page I now just text to parents instead of explaining all of this from scratch every fall.