<p>The scholarships you receive from outside sources will be used to reduce the work study portion of your financial aid package. For example, if you are awarded a $2,000 National Merit Scholarship, your work study expectation will be reduced by the full $2,000. Only after your work study has been completely eliminated will your scholarships begin to reduce any Columbia Grant you may have received.</p>
<p>PLEASE NOTE: Outside Scholarships/outside funding may NOT reduce the Parent Contribution or the Student Contribution (summer work expectation).</p>
<p>So if my parent contribution is like 1000 and my student cont is 2400, there is not possible way so eliminate those costs????</p>
<p>Well, what if your FA was zero (no work study or grants.) Then wouldn’t an outside scholarship be applied to paying your tuition and that would be lowering your or parents’s contribution? Or if your outside scholarship was greater than FA rec’d the scholarship - FA amt would reduce your contribution?</p>
<p>Well, I am thinking they mean outside scholarships cannot reduce parent/student contribution unless all work-study and grants have been eliminated by the scholarship first. Then, the remaining scholarship, if any, could reduce parent/student contribution. However, if parent/student was 1000+2400=3400, then unless outside scholarship is more than cost-3400, the entire scholarship would be ‘spent’ eliminating work-study and grant.</p>
<p>Actually, we are running into this with DS. He has a substantial amount of outside scholarships that far exceeds his expected contribution and work study. The amount of outside scholarships exceeds my parent contribution, as well. So, if his first choice school applied his scholarships to cover our entire expected contribution, they would still have scholarship money going to pay his grant from the school. However, they originally told us that none of my parent contribution could be covered by his outside scholarships. We are currently working with the school to reevaluate our family contribution which, as they have it calculated, is $8-9,000 over what FAFSA calculated our EFC to be. Hoping your school will give you a similar opportunity to appeal. Otherwise, you are evidently correct, winning a lot of scholarships is pointless. Crazy system…</p>
<p>It also depends on the type of scholarships. I talked to my counselor about this issue, and she said that most scholarships are awarded by the scholarship committees directly to the college. Some, however, are given directly to the student, so they may be used to cover costs outside of the colleges restrictions. Again, this is just what my counselor relayed to me, so I’d get another source to make sure.</p>
<p>happykidsmom: wow, just to be clear, you are saying that if (work-study + Columbia grant) is less than the outside scholarship… the remaining outside scholarship goes …where? So, if work-study plus grant was 5,000 and scholarship was 9,000. the first 5,000 pf scholarship goes to paying the work-study plus grant portion. What is the remaining 4,000 aplied towards?</p>
<p>Kerri, for ease of understanding, let’s just say that the student has $15,000/yr. in outside scholarships. And, once again, for ease of calculation, let’s say that the student’s grant/expected contributions are as follows:</p>
<p>$5000–Student contribution (work study and Pell grant–no loans)
$5000–Parent contribution
$50,000–Columbia Grant</p>
<p>When DS was applying for umpteen scholarships, we assumed that after $15,000 was applied by colleges, the final tally would look like this:</p>
<p>Instead, what actually occurs is:
$0–Further Student Contribution ($5000 scholarship applied)
$5000–Further Parent Contribution ($0 scholarship applied)
$40,000–Columbia Grant ($10,000 scholarship applied)</p>
<p>After speaking with a financial aid consultant yesterday, we learned/were reminded of two important facts about FA packages:
They are calculated amidst the chaos of admissions decisions and it is nigh impossible for each application to receive a complete review if there are special circumstances.
Schools have no idea what sorts of outside scholarship money the student has coming in when the financial aid packages are written.</p>
<p>So, my advice to the OP would be to write an appeal, explaining any special circumstances that might lower the expected parent contribution and explain that $X in scholarship money is coming their way. They should work with you to make sure those hard-earned scholarship dollars are working for you.</p>
<p>Happykidsmom: Forgive me; one more question.
(Leaving out a Pell grant,) when you say ‘student contribution’ (that first gets eliminated by the outside scholarships),
do you mean work study (student employment in the FA letter) plus the original ‘student contribution’ (that was listed as a ‘resource’ in the FA letter?
Or, just the work study (student employment in the FA letter.)</p>
<p>For example, if initially
Parent Cont = 40,000
Student Cont = 3,000 (coa 60,000 - 43,000 = 17,000)
Student Employment = 2,000
Columbia Grant = 15,000</p>
<p>The after 15,000 scholarship
Parent Cont = 40,000
Student Cont = 0 (3000 scholarship applied)
Student Employment = 0 (2000 scholarship applied)
Columbia Grant = 5,000 (10,000 scholarship applied)</p>
<p>So, they apply the scholarship first to not only student employment (work-study) but the initially stated student contribution?</p>
<p>Wow, I didn’t think the scholarship reduced the student contribution before reducing the Columbia grant. That is interesting that it reduces the student contribution but not the parent. Thanks for your help!</p>
<p>What happens if your scholarship up to $60,000?
Would your parent contribution be reduced assuming that Columbia’s grant and work study is
$45,000 altogether?</p>
<p>Schoolfees, I’m not sure I understand your question. Are you saying that you have a $60,000/year outside scholarship? And a combined Columbia grant/work study of $45,000? If you have $60,000/year in outside scholarships, it’s my understanding that anything over the $45,000 would go toward your parent contribution. However, $60,000 TOTAL in outside scholarships is only $15,000/year. Lots of variables there that your post wasn’t clear about.</p>
<p>So, happykids, you believe that if there is any grant money left after replenishing the student contribution, student work-study, student loans and school grant… the remaining can then pay down the parent contribution. That makes sense, what would happen with that money otherwise?</p>
<p>BTW, for anyone following this, this isn’t just Columbia’s policy. I saw it on other schools websites as being done in this fashion. Wellesley’s website states:
‘Receipt of outside scholarships must, by Federal law, reduce or alter your financial aid.’</p>
<p>Kerri, If I understand your question correctly, yes. However, I don’t think there are a lot of students out there with that much scholarship money coming in annually. For instance, there are some scholarships out there that are for $50-60,000. However, that is divided over four years. So, the annual payment for a 60,000 scholarship is $15,000. They may be out there, but I don’t know of any $60,000/year outside scholarships. To cover the full expenses for college as it has been explained to me by one school, all of the student’s contributions AND the entirety of the college grant would have to be covered by outside scholarships before any outside dollars could be applied to the parent contribution. Once again, I’m just a mom trying to figure this all out. But that is what I understand from talking to an Ivy FA department and a FA counselor associated with one of DSs scholarships. I, too, would be curious to see the federal law that applies here.</p>
<p>I also saw it on many school’s websites. It sucks to know that I wasted my time applying for some scholarships considering my FA package was very generous. -_-</p>
<p>If it makes you feel any better, what I have told my son is that there is no way to determine the effect that his scholarships had on his acceptance to top universities, but it definitely didn’t hurt. 1) Having multiple national/international scholarships on his list of awards certainly helped shore up weaknesses in his application. 2) Although universities can’t get an exact tally on the $$ a student will bring to the school through scholarships, they have an idea. The mere fact that those dollars will be going into the school’s coffers further strengthens an application. Is the picture exactly as we had envisioned? No. But do we know that he would have been admitted to the schools he was accepted to without the scholarships? No. My guess is that both his app list and his acceptances would have looked very different without the scholarships. I feel that, in the end, it will all work out for the best. But do I feel kind of ill-informed/ignorant for not knowing this in advance? Definitely. Yet another lesson learned.</p>