<p>I was recently admitted to Vanderbilt through the MOSAIC program. If I win a few small scholarships, could they be used towards my EFC since Vanderbilt no longer includes student loans in their financial aid packages?</p>
<p>The way I understand it is that you can use your first scholarships to cover the work study amount; however anything after that goes to Vandy until you cover the amount of aid they give you.</p>
<p>So, lets say you have an EFC of 35,000 and total cost of 60000. vandy would give you 22500 in grants with a 2500 work study.</p>
<p>Total cost 60000
vandy grant 22500
work study 2500
you pay 35000</p>
<p>if you get 10,000 in scholarships; you can offset the work study with 2500 from your scholarship. it would look like this:</p>
<p>total cost 60,000
vandy grant 15000
your scholarship offset 7500
work study; paid/off set by 2500 of your scholarship
you pay 35000 (still)</p>
<p>Ok thanks for clearing that up. For some reason a student that goes there told me otherwise, but he wasn’t certain.</p>
<p>Actually, you need to check with the financial aid office instead of asking other students. I think it works differently for different people. For our son the smaller scholarships not only replaced his work study but also reduced our contribution. The amount of the grant money was not affected. The financial aid office explained to us that it really depends on the family’s financial situation, etc. Something about our federal EFC being very different from institutional EFC before he got the scholarships, and scholarships made one of them closer to the other. I don’t really understand this enough to give any advice, but I think you should call them and check.</p>
<p>I agree with Doctorzzz. In every situation I’ve seen, scholarships (both inside and outside) eliminate work-study (or a “student contribution,” which I believe ends up on some fidaid packages instead of work-study if they aren’t eligible for work-study) then begins to just cut out of the grant. </p>
<p>Basically any scholarship money greater than 2000 and less than the value of your grant doesn’t help you at all.</p>