<p>I wanna apply ED, but i heard you might not get good financial aid. Is that true?</p>
<p>You will get financial aid. What you won't be able to do is compare the Penn offer of aid to any other school except a rolling admission school.</p>
<p>schools are less likely to give as good FA early decision as they would regular. if you get in you cant back out. they say you can if financial circumstances make it necessary, but the school has to determine this, so while your family may say you cant afford it, the school could say that you can. so you could end up with a bad package :-</p>
<p>Penn meets 100% of need, so I think it's probably going to be the same package as if you apply RD, a school like Penn is going to be inordinately expensive no matter what, and their financial aid package is very unlikely to differ from that of peer institutions.</p>
<p>penn isnt meeting 100% of MY need and penn is also the only school i had to pay an app fee for.. booo.. lol. still, you have better chances of getting in early, but a better chance of a good package if you apply regular and get in</p>
<p>alright, 100% of what THEY think you need, but all schools are like that. Still, i've compared my aid package with friends who applied early and are in similar financial straights as I, and there's no appreciable difference, and I applied RD.</p>
<p>well i applied to ten schools.. and when i compared what they were giving me to what the government said i should be getting (ie on fafsa) all the other packages either matched that or were more generous.. penn charged about twice what i should be paying according to the gov (NOT according to me.).. its still manageable thanks to a scholarship i got (and really, i wasnt gonna say no to penn :-D) but still lol.</p>
<p>if that's really the case that penn did not meet your fafsa-demonstrated need, you should cal sfs and complain, i've heard of their financial office screwing things up from time to time, but also fixing the issues once they were brought to their attention. Penn, and most schools do shady things with scholarships though, like giving you half of it and then taking the other half away from you in financial aid, so that might have been it too.</p>
<p>Remember that little picture that they ask you to submit with your application? Did you ever stop to think what it's for? I've heard from confidential sources (whom I won't disclose at this point) that this picture has trememdous bearing on your financial aid. So it might not hurt to invest in a few pounds of make-up: it could compensate for thousands in the long run.</p>
<p>the scholarship was from an outside source.. and yea the amount i received in that scholarship got rid of my student contribution then a teensy bit from my stafford loan.. </p>
<p>only teensy though..</p>
<p>either way, my college advisors maintained that you have a better chance of getting a good package regular, as did a few admissions officers at different colelges i visited (tufts, yale, bc.. to name some)</p>
<p>when do receive your financial aid package if u apply ed? do outside scholarships go into how much financial aid u get?</p>