<p>This may be a stupid question, but if you receive a merit award from the University of Rochester, will it decrease your need-based award? Or will the merit- and need-based awards be combined? </p>
<p>I'm a little confused about how this works. </p>
<p>Yes, merit will reduce or eliminate your need-based aid.</p>
<p>This how it works:</p>
<p>The University will use the CSS Profile to determine your EFC (expected family contribution). It will use the FAFSA to determine your eligibility for federal student loans & grants (student loans, Perkins loans, Pell grants, work study). </p>
<p>Your EFC will include both an expected parental contribution and an expected student contribution. The expected student contribution will increase each year you’re in college since as you gain education and work experience, you’re expected to be able to find better paying summer employment.</p>
<p>COA - EFC (Profile determined) = need</p>
<p>If you receive any merit aid, that amount will be deducted from your “need”</p>
<p>COA - (EFC + merit) = need</p>
<p>If you have any need left after both the EFC and merit award have been applied, any amount remaining will be awarded in need based aid.</p>
<p>Need based aid at UR will include federal student direct loans, work study, possibly Perkins loans and Pell grants, as well as any school-based grant aid.</p>
<p>WayOutWestMom, this is not entirely true for Rochester, at least on their NPC. A higher merit award can reduce loans and/or work study, though not dollar-for-dollar. If you run their NPC and put in different merit amounts (it lets you pick at the end), it will change your loan and/or work study amounts. It looks like about $.30 reduction in loans for every $1 increase in merit as I recall. I was pretty impressed they did that, though their resulting financial aid did not totally follow their NPC.</p>
<p>I’m assuming that’s because big merit reduced the need and cut into the EFC.</p>
<p>D2’ got big merit, big enough she was not offered any school sponsored grants, nor federal work-study, nor subsidized loans. Her need was covered only through unsub federal loans.</p>
<p>Thanks for the details, Daddio3 and WayOutWestMom.</p>
<p>My belief is that even schools which say you can “stack” merit on top of financial need look at the total package and divvy it up as it makes sense to them. I believe this based on talking to some financial aid people at other schools about their processes - not a specific student or situation but generally. </p>
<p>This can get into ranking. Meaning they will reach more for some students than for others and that, sensibly, might might include not only financial need but whether they think a student might actually attend, how that student ranks versus other students in that college/major/etc. and so on. If you think about how this might work - and you notice I use “might” a lot because this stuff is proprietary and I don’t know how it actually works - you could see numerical ranking guesses for a bunch of these concerns and these could then generate a number or feed into various pools for merit money versus aid grants versus loans (based on the size of each pool, the number of slots available, etc.). All I know for sure is that I’ve talked with people outside UR about this stuff and they’ve given me very rough descriptions of their ranking methods, but nothing exact, no algorithms, etc. </p>
<p>To step back, the school has various pots of money. They have scholarships, some pegged to performance measures (like Merit Scholars). They have aid grants. They certainly know the amount of federal aid their school is likely to pull year to year for its students. Each of these must be broken down: this many merit scholarships, this many grants of this type and that, etc. </p>
<p>I’m going through this because I think it might be helpful in the larger context: the total package partly reflects how the school ranks you, not just their appreciation of need or merit, and that ranking may include whether you’re a reach for the school (meaning you’re unlikely in their eyes to attend) or the number of prospective engineers (or whatever your major might be). In that regard, remember many schools tell you bluntly that getting into this or that part of their school is easier/harder than … which reflects how many faculty they have in that area, what they’ve invested, what their investment plans are, etc. </p>
<p>Lergnom, that is what I think also. They obviously want a student who earned a $14k scholarship as my son did, so they made sure the financial aid portion of his package was generous enough to make the whole thing a good offer. With identical financial picture, had my son earned NO merit scholarship, would they simply have given him another $14k in financial aid? I don’t believe so. And as I said up above, their net price calculator reflects this by reducing loans and work study as the merit you guess you will get goes higher.</p>