My daughter has what sound like similar swim stats and worse academic stats, and before she made a decision, she was offered a full ride (and yes, I know what a “full ride” is, and that is what was offered) at two mid-major D1 schools. The only other school she visited before she committed offered her 50%. She is on a full ride, moving into her dorm tomorrow; we paid less than $500 for her fall semester. So, yes–there are 50% offers out there, notwithstanding that many on this board vehemently insist that there are not. Our daughter does not qualify for need-based aid. She targeted schools where she could score at conference with her current times–MAC, CAA and one more I can’t remember, and she got very positive responses. You can combine automatic merit money and athletic money if the athlete’s ACT total adds up to–maybe a 105? There are a couple of other ways to qualify to stack (which is important only in that, if you qualify, automatic merit does not count against the team’s scholarship allotment)–one involves class rank, but I don’t remember what the cutoff is.
Notwithstanding our experience, we do know swimmers who are faster than my daughter who didn’t get nearly as much money. I think it’s all in how you target your schools. She (not me) did all of the communicating with coaches starting in tenth grade; we visited the top contenders on our own dime in spring of her junior year; and she narrowed it to 3 or 4 schools before official visits. She visited 2, canceled the third and made her decision. Two schools made offers before official visits; one made it afterwards. There is money out there, and if you “only” need 50%, there’s likely to be a spot. I would really spend some time on CollegeSwimming.com; pay the $25 or so for the upgraded membership, and see where her times put her as one of the top couple of swimmers in her events. I don’t know if you said what year your daughter graduates, but if she’s '19, she’s late; if she’s '20, she needs to get busy but hasn’t missed the boat yet.
@isoswimandclass I don’t know if this is your first to go to college, but we now have two. While it isn’t “aid,” your home spending will go down when one leaves the home. When we went from food for 5 to food for 4, our food bill did drop about 20%, going out to eat, the bill also dropped. We save a little on car insurance with one removed from the policy. I bet there was at least $100/month of misc. that dropped as well. On top of that was about $500/month in violin lessons. So, while we didn’t get much merit aid, sending someone to school wasn’t as expensive as we thought it was going to be.
This is the best online community for anxiety-ridden (not totally but a little) and information-starved parents dealing with this stuff. Thank you so much for all the helpful info. We do have a membership at CollegeSwimming.com and have used it extensively to find schools within a certain radius.
There were a number of excellent suggestions, which we greatly appreciate. One that we did not think of was targeting conferences (duh). We were thinking about specific schools but we’ll need to take another look at the entirety of a conference where D can score. Just a few more months left …
There are quite a few private schools that now say they will meet your child’s full demonstrated need for need based aid and have a sliding scale for tuition based on parents income as I’m sure you are aware. I just want to make sure I understand your comment on need based aid being offset by any athletic aid.
This aid is availabe for all students not just athletes. So under an example of a school’s full tuition is $60k but based on student’s demonstrated need calculates an award of $35k lowering tuition to $25k then any athletic award would lower the need based award? If so I would think unless a student is highest level recruit, the need based aid would likely be more than the potential athletic award? Is that correct. We are just starting to look at this with our child who is a junior and curious how it works. Thanks for the info
This conversation is old but starts to explain it. NCAA rules require schools to “count” financial aid against a school’s limit of athletic money they can give out. Schools will usually offer you one or the other, but not both unless they are not bumping up against the NCAA limit of what athletic aid they can give (and need aid that must be counted).
Keep in mind that the NCAA’s rules on need-based and automatic merit aid are not the same. NCAA bylaw 15.5.3.2.1 describes the cases in which automatic merit aid doesn’t count against the NCAA’s scholarship limit.
No. Usually the only need based awards that combine with athletic awards are federal (Pell) or state grants. Need based funds would have to be counted as athletic awards. Merit aid from the school is different if the student meets certain criteria.