<p>The Smith College softball team spent their spring break
in California and to make a long story short, my D receives
a post card from one of the seniors on the Smith College
softball team while the team is in Calf. </p>
<p>How should we read this at this late date? </p>
<p>Does anyone have knowledge of a similar scenario relative to
recruitment of a D-3 athlete and financial aid?</p>
<p>Can one assume that the % of grants & scholarships compared to
self-help in a financial aid package indicates how much the school
wants them?</p>
<p>I don't know anything about athletic recruiting, but at Smith at least the financial aid package (unless you get a STRIDE, Ford, Zollman, or Dunn merit award) hews pretty closely to federal formulas....in my experience, they don't seem to use grants v. loans as a way of recruiting specific populations the way some schools (princeton, i recall) do.</p>
<p>stacy stated.... "in my experience, they don't seem
to use grants v. loans as a way of recruiting specific
populations the way some schools (princeton, i recall) do."</p>
<p>Allow me to take the liberty of reading into the above.</p>
<p>The Ivys do not offer athletic scholarships as well as
D-3 schools such as Smith & MIT, but they might
leave open a window to compete with peer institutions
for desirable students with grants v loans ratios in award
packaging</p>
<p>Stacy, it will probably be denied or ducked, but I'd make a side bet of $100 that FinAid does jigger proportion of grant to other aid for some students. I know that some competing LAC's do it on a matrix...GPA/SAT score = kaching! a combo of grants/loans.</p>
<p>Btw, can you shed any light as to what a Dunn merit scholarship is? I don't believe that I've run across that before.</p>