<p>Be sure to also find out how outside scholarships are handled. In most cases, they are used to reduce either the amount of loans or grants in the FA package.</p>
<p>In other words, you're pretty much stuck with EFC.</p>
<p>Merit aid is almost always a positive. Probably 90+% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. don't have sufficient financial resources to meet 100% of demonstrated need, so they'll "gap" students, giving them less FA than they "need" according to the school's own calculations. At those schools, merit awards are often a way of deciding which students will get more of their demonstrated need met. Among schools that do promise to meet 100% of demonstrated need, only a tiny handful are able to meet 100% of demonstrated need with grants; the rest offer FA packages in which grants are combined with work/study and loans, the latter two categories essentially forms of "self-help" in which the college isn't paying, it's merely helping find an alternative way for YOU to pay that portion of the cost of your education and packaging it as "aid." To the extent merit awards are substituted for the work/study and loan components of the FA package, the student and her family are clearly financially better off. And of course, for students with a very high EFC who are consequently eligible for little or no need-based FA, a merit award can be pure gravy.</p>