Does Vanderbilt provide need based or merit based aid to top students?

Does Vanderbilt provide need based or merit based aid to students? In addition do they stack scholarships. Please provide a name of the scholarships for computer science/math students. Does it help if student is a female student? Any help or direction will be appreciated. Thanks

These questions are answered on their website. There are a few special category scholarships for merit but a few years back, Vandy rolled almost all their merit dollars into signature scholarship categories of which there are three. Chancellors, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Ingram. https://www.vanderbilt.edu/scholarships/ Vanderbilt’s need based aid is outstanding and almost the most generous in the nation. There are no loans in packages, only grants. Grants are strictly calculated based on the forms (two, FAFSA and CSS Profile) that your parents must fill out and file for the review of the financial aid office. Vanderbilt will make its own determination of what your family must contribute, but it will not ask you to also take out loans. The question of “stacking” scholarships requires you to thoroughly understand each college and each scholarship. It is a lot to memorize but so worth your time. Try an Excel chart to keep deadlines and requirements in your head. No Loans financial aid is a fabulous category for any college. Few can afford to do it.

Thanks a lot

As mentioned above, three main merit scholarships which are all full tuition, and basically break down to select three different types of students, with different focuses (although these aren’t strict definitions): Cornelius Vanderbilt (academics/research) Chancellor’s (diversity/leadership) Ingram (community service). There are also a few smaller scholarship programs funded by certain donor families that select for their own type of student, but these are usually only given to a handful of students in each class. Your application is automatically considered for these as long as you submit the CV scholarship application (usually).

Everybody else receives need-based grant financial aid (although having a full-tuition scholarship doesn’t preclude getting additional grant-based financial aid if your need is greater than the cost of tuition alone). I would check the net price calculator if you’re curious about how much aid to expect. https://www.vanderbilt.edu/financialaid/net-price-calculator.php

As far as scholarship “stacking” goes: the school usually also accepts outside scholarships, and designates money for things like national merit (I think $2500 a year). However, these just come out of the grant based aid you receive, so for example: if you received $40,000 in aid all under the designation “grants”, you could then apply a $10,000 outside scholarship. However, then your package would be changed to have $30,000 in grants and $10,000 in outside scholarship. I’m not quite sure what would happen if you were otherwise a full-pay student who had been given a full-tuition scholarship, and then were also trying to apply an outside scholarship. I think you would be able to stack those in that situation.

You might get a tiny admissions bump for being a female student applying to the school of engineering, but I don’t think gender would affect things at all while being considered for scholarships.

Correct, my daughters received excellent need-based grants. One got a scholarship we didn’t even know about her soph-senior year. It was designated for a student who came from the county of the married couple who established the scholarship. Since my daughter was the only one in the school from that met the criteria… she got the scholarship! LOL. They applied that first, which covered most of tuition, then stacked her smaller scholarship on top of that. After that, she got need based grant to cover some of room and board, then our “EFC” made up the difference.