<p>Is there financial aid for transfers? Merit aid? Is it based strictly on your freshman year performance, or do you need to go back to your SAT/ACT and hs performance?</p>
<p>For those students agonizing about their college choice, we were wondering what truth there is in the phrase: "You can always transfer"? If there is no financial aid available (merit or need), then transfer choices would be severely limited.</p>
<p>Merit aid is severely limited for transfer students. Several schools well-known for merit aid to freshmen don't offer it to transfers. For example, S received reasonable merit aid from a particular school for freshman admission; he applied there for transfer and was accepted, but no merit $$ (had he wanted that school, we might have tried to change that, but he didn't). There are some merit awards for transfer at some schools - but your list of possibles will go down by several orders of magnitude. Based on my son's stats and their histories, he would have likely gotten good to great merit aid as a freshman from 4 of the schools he applied to for transfer. As a transfer, he got a small award from one school only. He chose a reach-type school, so it was moot. But had merit aid been critical, he would have had only that one choice.</p>
<p>Need-based aid I am not sure; I'm sure others will know.</p>
<p>Our flagship state university has limited in-state community college transfers in order to accommodate full-freight OOS ones, on whom they can make a bundle. The whole idea is to NOT give out much aid, merit or need-based.</p>
<p>This is a question that is best asked of each institution one is considering transferring to. Many institutions do offer aid to transfers, both need-based and merit, while others - including many highly selective schools - do not offer transfer students any form of aid at all. Each institution has a different policy, so ask them to be 100% sure!</p>
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<p>I can offer one anecdote -- a kid I know who transferred from a local CC to PLU got terrific aid. That's one school that offers merit aid to transfer students, it appears. But definitely check with individual schools. My impression is that many colleges don't offer much merit $$ to transfers. I think the need based aid is a much better bet, providing that one qualifies for it.</p>