College Financial Aid Award Letters Confidentiality

I always recommend to kids who are in public high schools, to talk to their GCs with specific questions about local and state schools where most of the kids tend to go. They are often the best source of info as to how those schools treat the kids from their high school.

Merit aid sure, need based aid no. One of our GCs asked and that’s what I told her.

Don’t give out meaningless information that would only add to the confusion - unless you or your kid needs the ego boost of claiming they got $50 million in aid/scholarships but most of that is need based aid at 1,000 schools they applied to, and can only attend one.

Ask the person asking to think about the kid who qualifies for a $10,000 Pell grant - purely based on family income. If they applied to one school they’d get $10K. But if the same person applied to 100 schools, it would be $1,000,000 in aid - but they can’t use 99% of it. Does the school really want to confuse people like that?

DD’s school specifically wanted just merit numbers. They were very clear about that. The graduation “book” did list everyone’s college and all the awards (by name, ie president’s award) underneath their name. (College prep HS where 99% of students went on to 4 year colleges).

The max Pell is $6095…not $10,000…

But I agree. It’s none of anyone’s business what aid you qualified for. None of their business.

Our school used to also print all the colleges the grads got accepted to…ridiculous. That has changed too. It went down to just printing the school a kid was attending to not printing it at all.

In my opinion…this is a false sense of bragging rights for HSs who feel the need to print this info.

Right on the Pell grant max. I rounded the numbers up to 10K to make the math easier for my simple calculation example.