Apologies if this has been addressed before.
I’ve seen on boards here at CC that some colleges stack scholarships. How does one determine if a specific school will do that? Would it require a phone call, or is there a handy list here somewhere of the more well-known schools that do?
A school may have different rules for different scholarships.
For example, there may be scholarships A, B, and C, where the student can get only the largest of the ones that s/he earns, but there may be other scholarships X, Y, and Z that may be stacked on any of A, B, and C or each other.
Each school is different. I would search their website, it usually says there( although it may be in super small print) If you can’t find it, the only way to know for sure is to call or email the school.
Thanks! I haven’t had much luck with the websites for a couple of schools, so I’ll give them a call.
Call. Many admins will dance around emails or not actually answer your question (relatively few families are aware enough to ask questions like this). For the same/marketing reasons, policies are often not posted on the websites (or hard to find).
We ended up asking the two schools that my daughter was choosing between directly by making a phone call.
That depends on the school and depends on the scholarship too.
It is sometimes hard to know. At my daughter’s school, they don’t stack the school merit awards (there are 3 levels and you can only get one level), but do stack all the others. You can get to the first level of scholarships by several different things like being an eagle scout OR high school robotics OR grades/scores, but if you get to the second or third levels (mainly grades/scores) you take that and not the eagle scout award. You can then get an award for visiting the school, for having a sibling at the school, for being referred by an alum, and those all stack (much smaller award). You can also stack any outside scholarships.
It certainly was the case for us that we didn’t know until we got the letters from the schools. Very frustrating, but then again we’d gone into the process expecting that we couldn’t stack, so when a couple of schools came back with stacked scholarships, to us that was a bonus.
We rarely found this information on the school’s web sites,
The financial aid or admissions office might be able to give you some general guidelines, but there are so many possibilities…
Can you tell us what type of awards these are?
If one is a tuition scholarship, then usually you can’t stack another of the school’s tuition scholarship offers unless it says so. For instance, the 2nd award may state that this scholarship covers the OOS portion of tuition, while the 1st award may say that it covers $5000 towards tuition. And there’s a mention that the two awards can combine.
However, if one award is a tuition scholarship from the school, but another award is from the Major Dept (say eng’g), then usually you can stack.
Email the scholarships office and give examples for them to respond to.
When my son attended Marquette, he received several merit scholarships, which could be stacked, but could not exceed the cost of tuition.
Thanks, mom2collegekids. Will do.
My reason for asking is that if she goes with UMBC there would be automatic tuition remission, plus merit from the school. She is also in line to receive a merit scholarship from DH’s employer, and she may look for other outside scholarships. Since they’re all from different sources, I thought it was worth a shot that they would stack. I’ll check into it with UMBC and UMD.
However, if I understand the literature from the employer correctly, any school DD considers where the scholarship would be based on Nat’l Merit would cause the employer scholarship – which is also based on NM scores – tp be voided out by the school award. (It seems that any NM-based funds from other sources decrease the funds from them.) Yet another reason to considerthe Maryland and Alabama schools!!
Tuition remission is even more of a different beast. Is the remission amount 100% of tuition? Many schools that offer tuition remission or exchange will not allow the total sum of awards to exceed the cost of tuition. A school will often deduct the outside scholarship from the amount of the tuition remission - that way they’re getting paid some money for that student attending, but the family doesn’t see any difference in costs, the money just comes from a different source.
The tuition remission is 100%. It’s a benefit from DH working for the Maryland University System for 25+ years. I do know that any merit given by the school does not affect the remission, because my older daughter got both the remission and the full merit award she was offered from UMBC. They did not lower the merit – she was able to pay room, board, fees, books, and have about $200 left over, which was deposited to her account. I’m not sure what they’d do about other sources of merit, though. My supposition is that, although they can’t lower the amount of tuition remission, they might lower their own merit offer to compensate for any other merit coming in. Thus, my initial question about stacking!
In any case, both girls are in a great position as long as they attend MD schools. Another thread I started prior to this one was asking if, considering this situation, it was even meaningful to look further afield. I got some wonderful feedback there, too. Thanks, everyone!