I’ve got a daughter graduating high school in 2017. She has been very smart about her college search, focusing on schools that give good merit money. She has a 35 on ACT and will be a NMSF (almost perfect score), good activities, plus we are from Louisiana. I think she’ll get some decent offers, but can we also get financial aide to help? One school told me you take one or the other. I found that hard to believe.
Many schools do not stack aid. They will reduce your need based aid by the amount of the merit aid, whether it is merit aid given by the college or an outside source. Some schools will replace loans with merit aid, though, so that is something. You can’t usually tell what a school’s policy is from their website, you often have to call and talk to their FA office.
Some schools do tie merit aid to need as well. But the way aid usually works is merit is used first. If there is need after taking the merit aid into account you will be awarded need based aid on top of that to whatever the college calculates as your need (if they do meet need).
Some schools will allow merit to first replace unmet need, student loans, and work study, but then will replace financial aid grants before allowing the merit to reduce family contribution. Examples:
https://students.ucsd.edu/finances/financial-aid/types/scholarships/
http://financialaid.stanford.edu/aid/outside/
However, some may reduce grants earlier in the sequence. Some may have different policies for different scholarships. Many schools do not list policies on their web sites. You may need to ask each college specifically if it does not say.
Depends on the school, generally merit scholarships reduce need so merit scholarships effectively cancel out need based aid. Some schools will “stack” scholarships. I haven’t looked into this too closely as we won’t qualify for need based aid but I did make sure that the college my daughter will attend will stack outside scholarships onto the schools merit scholarships.
Who told you “one or the other”? While in some ways that’s true, and in some ways that’s not.
Are you low income? If not, then likely once a good-sized merit offer is subtracted from cost, then the remaining costs may be less or equal to your EFC…so you wouldn’t qualify for need based aid.
here’s some examples.
$50,000 School’s COA
$24,000 Merit scholarship
$26,000 remaining cost
$26,000 remaining cost
$22,000 EFC (subtracted)
$ 4,000 remaining “need”
$ 4,000 student loan would cover the remaining need.
$60,000 School’s COA
$31,000 Merit scholarship
$29,000 remaining cost
$29,000 remaining cost
$10,000 EFC (subtracted)
$ 19,000 remaining “need”
If the school doesn’t promise to meet need, then you might also get…
$5,500 student loan
$2,000 student work-study (maybe)
$7,500 may be all that you’d get towards the remaining “need,” leaving you with a $11,500 gap.
$40,000 School’s COA
$35,000 Merit scholarship
$ 5,000 remaining cost
$5,000 remaining cost
$ 0 EFC (qualifies for full Pell Grant
$ 5,000 remaining “need”
$ 5,700 Pell Grant would cover the remaining need.
$45,000 School’s COA
$30,000 Merit scholarship
$15,000 remaining cost
$15,000 remaining cost
$20,000 EFC (so EFC is higher than remaining cost
$ No remaining “need” but the student could get a $5,500 unsub loan to put towards that remaining cost.
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but she has long wanted to attend W&L.
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^^ This may be a problem if you want your net cost to be low. have you run the NPC on the W&L website? At such a school, if your DD were to get merit, and your income is strong, then she likely would not get both merit and grants.
I see you posted in the thread where another parent had a similar question…using Northeastern as an example. In that case, once the NMF merit would be applied, the family had no need, so any grants would not be awarded.
Merit gets applied first.