Financial aid problem

<p>I was accepted to UCLA (OOS) about two weeks ago and have received my financial aid estimate. However, I did not receive any grant whatsoever. I did receive about 8000 in scholarship gift aid. My family is pretty low income and I'm surprised they didn't give me any grant. Is the scholarship aid basically the grant they give to OOS students. Could there have been a mistake and they forgot to give me aid? I received good grant money from other colleges, my EFC is about 4000. Is there anything I can do to get some grant money, even if it's just a couple thousand. I really would like to attend UCLA but it's a tad to expensive for my family.</p>

<p>You should know that OoS aid is fairly limited. The bulk of aid most students receive is made up of Cal Grants, which are available only to California students. The rest is University Grants, scholarships and the thousands of dollars in loans and work-study offered to just about everyone. </p>

<p>OoS fees will not be covered by any of this financial aid. The most you can hope for is a PLUS loan. I am afraid that UCLA might just be too expensive, especially if you have good aid from other colleges.</p>

<p>I may be incorrect, but what would the grant actually do? The scholarship is basically the same thing. For example, lets assume you are allotted a total of 10k aid, and 5k of it is loans and 5k is scholarships. If you want a grant of an extra 2k, they would take that out of your scholarship total. Meaning you would get 2k grants, 3k scholarships, and 5k loans.</p>

<p>EFC4000 is actually quite “high” to be honest. I had an EFC less than that and I don’t even qualify for grants, and I’m in-state (it’s the University of ‘California’, after all - they’d take care of the in-staters before worrying about any OOS). Actually it was a few digits above the PellGrant threshold now that I remember…</p>

<p>But keep looking. More scholarships can be found.</p>

<p>The thing with applying for scholarships is that if you get financial aid, more scholarships only reduce your financial aid. This was the case last year when I had a 2.3k scholarship. I was given like 10k of aid, reported the scholarship and my aid was reduced by 2.3k. In the end I had 10k of aid still.</p>

<p>Call the Financial Aid Office. Maybe you’ll get super lucky and get offered in-state tuition (probably not). I remembered someone got a similar offer from another public university in a different state, he’s from CA.</p>

<p>Do not report scholarships if the check is made out to you! UCLA will not find out unless whoever gave you the scholarship tells them.</p>