“@CourtneyThurston could you perhaps explain to this poster how these scholarships actually work in application?”
Yes. What it sounds like the student in the story did is add up the amount of all scholarships he received – even from the schools he didn’t end up attending. This is an extremely common, extremely obnoxious practice among students looking to brag about their scholarship “success” – when really they just applied to a lot of schools and added the financial aid packages together.
But even if that wasn’t what he was doing, that kind of success is very rare (I say that as someone who did have that kind of success.) You typically need an exceptional backstory (difficult family circumstances, etc), substantial financial need, national level or higher academic achievement, and huge numbers of community service hours to win outside scholarships. And, you’ll need to be a domestic student – VERY few outside scholarships are open to international students. If you don’t have all of this going for you (you don’t), you will find it very hard to win large amounts in outside scholarship money, especially renewable awards. I won 15 (I think) outside scholarships and I was left with (I think) only 4 renewable ones this year. Luckily, my renewable awards are very large. But this is rare.
The way scholarship money gets applied depends on your school, but the general process is this: dollar-for-dollar, every $ of outside scholarship money you win reduces aid your school gives you by that same $ amount. So you essentially must replace every dollar of the institutional aid before you’ll actually start making a net difference in the affordability of the school. Some/many schools will allow you to stack outside merit awards on top of THEIR merit awards, however – but NOT their financial aid, like grants, which will get reduced per the above description.
There is also a huge misconception out there that if you win a stupid amount in scholarship money, you get to pocket the overage. Not true. Scholarship money can be applied in the U.S. up to the Cost of Attendance – so that includes direct expenses like tuition, room and board, and fees, as well as the school’s estimate for personal expenses (shampoo etc), travel to and from the school, etc. If you have scholarship money all the way up to the total COA (again, VERY RARE), you can pocket the indirect expense money which will be returned to you as a refund (and by “pocket” I mean you get to use that money to pay for those personal expenses, travel, etc). But the rest of the money above and beyond the COA goes back to the scholarship organizations, who may or may not make you decline the scholarship on the basis of not needing it. So, if you win $1 million in outside scholarships (I have never heard of anyone truly doing this, just an example) and your school’s direct expenses are $30k per year and the COA is $50k per year, you will receive a $20k refund. NOT $970k.