I am concerned about the risk of merit scholarships and grants that are given on admission being denied renewal in subsequent years. My concern is that they can be used to sway a decision to attend a school, and once you are committed you are unlikely to switch even if the aid is cut as a sophomore or junior. We are seeing typical merit aid packages that chop the tuition in half, which puts some private schools within spitting distance of the costs of state schools and making them worth looking at (from a budget perspective) where the list price was simply ridiculous, from a value perspective as compared to good state schools.
I know these merit scholarships come with expectations of maintaining a specific GPA, remaining fully enrolled, and are usually only good for 4 years, which all seem like reasonable expectations and are fairly consistent across different schools.
We see some schools like Gonzaga where they make a lot of pretty firm commitments to maintaining the aid granted on admission and these claims are supported by the data on the College Navigator website that show about the same % of students granted scholarships as freshmen and among the entire undergrad population.
Other schools…well the data seem to tell a story that is more bleak, with 15 - 25% of freshmen who received scholarships later being denied renewal. Or at least that’s how I read it when it says 90-something percent of freshmen get a scholarship but only 70-something percent of the entire undergrad student body do.
I’ve been treating these gaps as a huge red flag. Should I? There could be different stories behind the data. For example, maybe the school is just over-generous in making grants on admission to students who really are not prepared to do well and who fail to get their aid renewed because they either drop out of they can’t make the grades. I know my student will do quite well, so maybe I shouldn’t worry! (Don’t we all tell ourselves that?) Or should I worry even more that these schools are just letting a bunch of poorly prepared students in who I don’t want as peers to my student, or their admissions process is corrupted by a “land the frosh at any cost!” attitude?
Some schools have a high GPA for renewal of merit awards. The ASU Barrett Honors awards required a very high GPA…and the renewals were not as high as for awards at other schools,wher the GPA requirement wasn’t as high.
Read the fine print, and also don’t exoect the school to change their policy just for you if you don’t maintain that GPA.
If your student does what he or she has to do to maintain their scholarship, you should be fine.
Kids lose the scholarships for dropping below a certain number of credits as well. It may be due to factors beyond their control (illness early in the semester, so they drop to part-time status to focus on two classes rather than get overwhelmed trying to catch up) or it may be that they’re majoring in partying and only minoring in going to class.
But we see a lot of kids on CC asking for advice on getting back their merit award… only to have us all realize that the kid isn’t eligible since he/she became a part time student without realizing that their award was for full time enrollment only.
You are also making a mathematical error on your calculation, since kids drop out or transfer out of a college for reasons that have nothing to do with their merit award.
I definitely think this is worth considering in your decision making. For some schools the required GPA to keep merit awards is the same as keeping “in good standing” at the university generally. That seems a pretty safe bet to me. At other schools the GPA to keep funding is much higher, and I see this as a potential problem. Even if I have confidence in my child’s abilities, that first semester of the freshman year is really an adjustment and a shock for lots of kids. And if you fail a class or get low grades, even if you eventually adjust and do well in the second semester or second year, your can end up losing funding. Some schools are getting smart and realizing that this pattern screws up their retention numbers and makes them look less attractive to prospective students.
Our kids got merit awards at exoensive colleges. Both were told by us…that they had to maintain the GPA required for continuation of their merit awards, or they would not be permitted to return to the college. We would not pick up the tab for the additional costs.
OP, I think that’s a reasonable analysis to make. As others have stated it could be due to a high GPA requirement, or lack of support for some students.
I think it is a factor to consider. My daughter knows that she has two scholarships she needs to maintain to remain at her school, her merit one that requires a 2.8 gpa and her athletic one that requires she continue to play. If either goes away, she can’t attend that school (although if her athletic one goes away she might be able to get need based aid to continue). She has other smaller scholarships that require a certain gpa and she could survive without them, but it is a consideration.
I think Bright Future is an example of a scholarship where the number of students receiving it goes down every year. First, you can only qualify for it as a freshman, so of course the numbers can only decrease. Many do lose if for not maintaining the gps, but quite a few lose it because they take the wrong number of credits (must take 12), drop classes during the year, take semesters off. Basically, there are a lot of rules and the students just don’t follow them.
Thanks all for the thoughtful replies. The GPA requirements are quite different, 2.0 vs. 3.0. While (to me at least) 3.0 doesn’t seem like a terribly high bar, such a difference must account for some of the difference in non-renewals, all other things being equal.
Families in this situation should also consider degree program. It’s not uncommon for more than 50% of a class to have less than a 3.0 in engineering, depending on the school.
Out of the scholarships (institutional and otherwise) I won:
1 requires a 2.0
17 require a 3.0
My honors program requires a 3.2
1 requires a 3.3
The ones to really be careful of are the ones where the renewal GPA is quite high, like 3.5. Then the student has to protect his/her GPA like a pre-med, which can discourage academic curiousity into areas where s/he may not be confident of getting A grades in.
The other thing to consider is when the GPA is checked for scholarship renewal purposes, and whether there is a probationary term before the scholarship is lost. First semester frosh year is generally the riskiest in terms of GPA, since the student does not have any previous courses and grades to buffer against one bad semester, and is making the transition from high school to college that semester.
Some of these students may drop out altogether or transfer. If the college has a low 6 year graduation rate, there is no reason to expect that some of the merit award winners aren’t among those. The thing to do is read the fine print, and ask the school if it is unclear what the rules for renewal are. A high GPA requirement is a red flag, especially for STEM majors.
I would look not only at the GPA requirements, but also the school’s process once a GPA requirement isn’t met. For instance, at my D’s school, there is a 3.0 GPA requirement to retain a scholarship. However, the GPA isn’t even looked at until the end of freshman year, so a rough 1st semester transition won’t be the end of it. Then if you have less than a 3.0 cumulative GPA you’re put on probation, so the scholarship isn’t lost immediately. As long as you get a 3.0 in every semester while you’re on probation (even if the cumulative GPA isn’t a 3.0 or greater), you keep the scholarship. This means that a disastrous semester (or a disastrous freshman year) won’t necessarily result in scholarship loss. Other schools pull the scholarship as soon as the GPA dips below 3.0, so the process can make a big difference.