<p>My daugher is estatic. She just received her acceptance letter from Wooster for the class of 2012. Inside the packet was a letter stating the following:</p>
<p>"According to the information on your application for financial aid your family's resources (the Expected Family Contribution for 2008-09 as calculated by the Free Application for Federal Student Aid),plus any merit scholarships you might win, make you ineligible for need-based aid." OUCH!</p>
<p>Can anyone tell me if this is pretty typical? I thought Wooster was quite generous with their financial aid programs. Also, in reference to the merit scholarships, doesn't that usually come with the acceptance letter? In the letter it states "plus any merit scholarships you might win" Have they not decided on this yet or do you think they are referring to outside scholarships one might receive on their own?
gggr8bllsofire24 is invisible</p>
<p>Let me say first that I have absolutely no hard knowledge to back this up, but I believe that some schools include merit aid with their admissions letters but some say it will arrive shortly. My sense is that your daughter will be getting some from Wooster--enough that she won't qualify for need-based aid. I think this is promising news.</p>
<p>And we're also waiting to hear from Wooster! Anybody else heard about their RD application?</p>
<p>I hope you're right. I think I'll call on Monday to inquire when we should hear on the merit awards. I am keeping my fingers crossed that they tell me the information will going out soon. I don't think it was very clear in the letter. What do you think??? Hopefully you should hear any day now. I called a couple of weeks ago to find out when notifications were being sent and they told me mid March. We received our letter today and live in Illinois so depending on where you live, I would think it would be any day now. GOOD LUCK</p>
<p>Got an email yesterday, I'm in... and I'm international. They didn't mention about FA and said this info will be included in the package they sent me, so I'm waiting for that package now...Good luck to all!</p>
<p>We're in Virginia--so maybe Monday. I almost wish I didn't know they'd been mailed! (Although I know many schools send them out in batches. . .) Best of luck to all potential future Fighting Scots!!</p>
<p>gggr8bllsofire, perhaps this has something to do with it. This is from their strategic plan:</p>
<p>"Financial Aid. Regarding financial aid, Wooster believes that it is important to halt the growth of the financial aid percentage (w.r.t. tuition) and to seek to fund goals of high priority in this strategic plan by lowering this percentage by up to five percentage points. However, this lowering of the financial aid percentage may not be possible if some number of the prerequisites established for the student body, or some number of the goals numbered 1 to 3, require at least the current level of expenditures in financial aid and are judged of such priority that they cannot be abandoned. As the largest single item in the College’s budget, financial aid is a crucial consideration. The current efforts to curtail financial aid gradually, without affecting the quality or size of the student body, will be key in determining how much flexibility exists in this component of the College’s budget."</p>
<p>Our son also got his letter on Friday and we're all thrilled. But nervous. No financial aid info so far. Our daughter was accepted 2 years ago but chose to attend Iowa. She was offered over $15k in merit aid at the time. So we have our fingers crossed.</p>
<p>to the OP, i received the same letter a month ago. it was by far the worse letter out of the five/six schools that claimed me ineligible for financial aid.</p>
<p>Lasercat, did you read post #6? In Wooster's stategic plan they state that they are curtailing financial aid slowly while trying to keep the quality and size of the student body!</p>
<p>Lasercat, Wow, I can't believe that. This was my daughter's first acceptance so I have nothing to compare it to. I saw on another post that you received a nice merit award. That's awesome! How long after the acceptance letter did you find out about that?</p>
<p>My daughter was accepted by Wooster, receiving the letter in mid-Feb, merit scholarship offer in the same package. She was offered $13,250 per year for four years -- highest of the three places she applied. Even better, this week we got another letter from Wooster saying they were "re-crafting" their financial aid packages to make Wooster more affordable -- so they upped her offer to $15,500! Sounds like Wooster may be rethinking the strategic plan mentioned above.
We did send in the fafsa, even though our income is high enough that I doubted we would qualify for anything. As expected, no other aid was offered, except for the possibility of a federal unsubsidized loan. Same result from all other schools.</p>