I am a high school senior, and I am curious as to whether I should apply for engineering departmental scholarships at the schools I applied to. Many of these scholarships have February deadlines, but I applied to 12 schools and will not know most of my regular decision admissions decisions until they are released in late March. I feel like doing these departmental scholarship applications would not be worth it, since they require additional essays, are not worth a lot of money, and I am unsure of which school I am going to attend; even if I win some departmental scholarships, they would be useless unless they were from the school I decide to attend. Therefore, I feel like focusing on local scholarships from outside organizations would be more beneficial, since they can be applied to any school I choose to attend. Also, I can still apply for departmental scholarships later on, when I am a freshman in college and certain that they will decrease the next year’s college costs.
Outside scholarships usually replace institutional scholarships dollar-for-dollar. So, you would net 0 benefit.
Apply for the scholarships even if you don’t know what school you’re going to. All the hard work is just a part of a college-bound senior’s year. Sorry.
When you say institutional scholarships, are you referring to merit scholarships? So if I received a $2000 scholarship from a local organization and a $20,000 merit scholarship from a certain school, the college would reduce their merit scholarship to $18,000? I would still receive $20,000 in scholarships and not $22,000?
Correct. That’s how it works at many (most?) schools. Check with yours; personally, at my school, they would “stack” the scholarships and I would receive the $22000. But this practice seems uncommon-ish.
I’ve found that schools will reduce their own scholarships if they are need based but not always merit based, and will allow stacking especially of private scholarships. So in the above example, if the student got a department scholarship (internal) and had need based scholarships, the need grant would be reduced because the need is reduced. If the other scholarship was merit, or it if were outside, it would not be reduced.
I agree doing the work is part of the process of getting scholarships. If you know there are 2-3 schools you can only go to with extra scholarships, work on those.