<p>Has anyone else looked at the scholarship page yet? According to the website, even though the Dean’s Scholarship is a MERIT based scholarship, you still need to fill out the CSS profile and FAFSA, even if you are not applying for financial aid…we e-mailed the office of financial assistance and they confirmed this…Anyone know what gives?</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.bu.edu/admissions/apply/scholar_merit[/url]”>www.bu.edu/admissions/apply/scholar_merit</a></p>
<p>DS auditioned as a music major for a performance award (which he received). He had to complete both the FAFSA and the PROFILE (and send two years of tax returns) for his scholarship. At the time, one had to complete ALL of these forms for ANY kind of financial aid at BU...need based or merit, with the exception of the Trustee and MLK Scholarships which both have a completely separate application. Count your blessings. Things have changed. It used to be that for finaid renewal of even MERIT aid, you had to complete the FAFSA and Profile AGAIN each year. I believe that is no longer the case (but you really need to check the BU finaid website for sure). BUT for initial application for both merit and need based aid, I believe you need to complete all of the finaid applications.</p>
<p>My S received the half tuition scholarship. I belive the DEan's one at 10K is the only merit one that requests the Profile. I have no idea why but I'll take a guess. Lets say your parents earn 250 K a year while another student does not meet critera for financial aid but perhaps her parents earn 100 K a year. While I do not believe that it goes by anything other than merit if you have 5 kids competing for the same merit scholarship then perhaps they look at the amount of challenge it might be for one family over another to pay full fee. Just a guess since I cannot think of any other reason than that they don't want to give it to an extremely wealthy student with decent stats but not high enough stats for them to get one of the larger scholarships. If you have the stats to get a full tuition one then they may want you regardless of your finances. Anyone else have any ideas on this mystery?</p>
<p>the only thing I could think of was that there are two pools of $$: one fin aid based and one merit based.....they may want to check financials to ensure that if you are getting a purely merit based scholarship, you are not eligible for any $$ at all (so they don't take $$ from merit that they could be taking from fin aid).....I have no idea, but what a pain in the "you know what"....We feel like idiots filling this out, but whatever (HeHe- I gave this job to my H!)......</p>