@CoMoMom: Congratulations to you and your daughter.
Regardless of what the outside award agency said, all outside awards must be turned over to Haravrd College. My daughter received several outside awards and those checks were endorsed by her and then sent to Harvard College with the appropriate paperwork for them to deposit. The money was never deposited in her ban accounts.
So the quick answer is: if the $20K is given in one lump sum, Harvard requires her to use the money first to replace (1) term-time job expectation, (2) summer earnings expectation, (3) demonstrated financial need (if the student has money in their name and that money is required to be spent on the student contribution), (4) computer, printer etc. Any remaining outside award then reduces her financial aid award dollar-for-dollar during her freshman year.
Yes
No, Harvard does not make exceptions to their institutional rules.
Here’s what I would suggest. Telephone the source of your daughter’s outside awards and ask them if they could give her $5,000 a year for the next four years instead of a $20,000 lump sum. In that way the money would go toward your daughter’s term-time job expectation and summer job expectation every year with less money being taken away from her scholarship.
@Planner We also received a revised award from Stanford too. Even so, Harvard still beats Stanford by over 10 thousands. So it may not help to appeal. We decided not to visit MIT and Yale anymore, but will go to Stanford for Admit Weekend and Harvard for Visitas. Stanford does provide some travel allowance, but not anything from Harvard yet.
@hmsy15 I’m not sure why all these schools don’t give comparable aid—they’re all working from the same forms, and none are giving merit aid. Yale did revise our award, and it’s now in line with the awards from Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. There’s just a few thousand dollars’ difference between the best (Harvard) and the “worst” (Princeton) now, so we feel very lucky to be able to carefully consider all four. We do still have to look carefully into whether the aid award from each school in the first year is typically comparable to the awards in later years, assuming no major changes in income, etc. Something to tackle soon—this has been a pretty overwhelming couple of days!
Good luck visiting Stanford and Harvard. (How are you doing that, by the way—leaving Stanford a day early or starting Visitas a day late? I wish the events didn’t overlap, especially since in our case, they’ll be preceded by Bulldog Days, meaning potentially two cross-country round-trip flights in very short order—expensive and exhausting.)
@Planner It is nice that Yale revised your award, and did it fast. It will be even better if Yale can give you a “side letter.”
We will be in Stanford on Wednesday evening, stay in the hotel on Wednesday, live with the Stanford host on Thursday evening, leave Stanford Friday morning, arrive in Boston Friday night, stay in the hotel, live with the Harvard host on Saturday, leave Harvard Sunday morning. Not a very good schedule, but get a overall feel for both colleges.
@hmsy15 Yes, we were really glad (and about the speed), and hopefully whatever Yale sends us will be clear about future years—if not, we’ll certainly ask.
I guess we’ll just have to make the best of the schedule! It probably works out at least a little better if you live on the East Coast, because you’ll only need to make one cross-country round-trip flight. My son is still debating about attending Visitas. He’ll be going to a local admitted students event here, and it’s possible he could visit Harvard again the weekend before Bulldog Days. But he doesn’t feel that would be the same experience; though it certainly wouldn’t be, I do think it would be helpful and a lot less problematic. We’ll see what he decides to do. He’s definitely going to Bulldog Days and Stanford’s admitted students weekend.