It is difficult to tell if merit stacks or if it reduces need.
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Most colleges do not have any specific statements on their web sites on the matter.
Among the few that do, they typically refer to outside scholarships, and most commonly replace expected student loans or work earnings and unmet need first, but then replace FA grants before reducing parent contribution. Policies on the colleges’ own merit scholarships with FA seem to be even more opaque in most cases.
I’d have to check my notes to get the details (we were getting financial pre-reads for my D as an athletic recruit from several schools). In any case, I’d say it’s worth following up to try to get some clarification.
D23 is attending Mount Holyoke. Prior to her enrollment my husband contacted the financial aid office several times and they were quite helpful. I don’t remember Mount Holyoke being on the list of the schools that consider 100% of home equity because we had 2 schools on her list that did consider 100% of home equity. D23 received a generous merit award plus financial aid.
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Mt Holyoke’s NPC was much higher than most other schools. It came off my D’s list for other reasons after being an early favorite, but the NPC certainly didn’t help at almost twice our FAFsa EFC. They are not doing themselves any favors by having the estimates come out that high - I always assume the NPC is mostly accurate (was at her ED school).
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Agreed!
The attached survey document from 2021 (not mine) indicates that Holyoke caps home equity at 2x income in their calcs, which is higher than some places, but equivalent to many.
From my recollection, plugging in different home equity values to a bunch of colleges’ NPCs about a year ago to reverse-engineer them, Holyoke’s didn’t have a home equity cap. So in many cases, actual need-based aid awards would exceed the NPC estimate. But, of course, many families would not be aware of this and decide not to apply in the first place because of high NPC numbers.
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