My son’s first choice college will require him/us to pay about $6000 out of pocket. Alternatively, he can attend our state school for free as a National Merit Finalist. He has applied for several schoalrships for which we feel he has a good chance, but the results won’t be out until after May 1. Any advice?
$6K per year? If he has a summer job and a 10-15 hr per week job at school he should be able to cover most, if not all of that. Is this amount before or after taking the federal loan amount?
A lot depends on the schools in question and his reasons for preferring one over the other.
It can be tough to predict scholarship outcomes. Will the $6K/year be a family hardship? Will there also be loans?
That does seem strange that the results won’t be available until so late. I would wonder how much my son wants to go to a particular school, whether I agree that the fit is best, etc. If all that is aligned and $6,000 is doable, then it wouldn’t matter to me what the results were of the scholarship possibilities.
Are these four year renewable scholarships…or for freshman year only?
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National Merit Scholarship notifications have been sent already. You can log on to their portal and see if he got the $2500 award.
Many national and local first year as well as continuing scholarships don’t notify until after May 1st. We are in a similar situation in which we know about aid and scholarships and loans through the 3 final schools, but they range in bottom line cost from $4K to $20K. Meanwhile my daughter has applied for the possible amount of $11K in private and local scholarships. Some are a slam dunk (My wife’s employer) and some only had a handful of applicants per the counselor, so we can ascertain the probability of getting them. We are guesstimating around $3-4K from the information available and are budgeting accordingly. If we reel in 8-10K, then great. But we will still have to decide to take the safe route at $4K which is the least desirable versus the 12K or 20K. If the scholarships don’t pan out at the higher levels, we will be on the hook for more loans etc. if we go the more expensive route.
It is a bit nerve wracking, flying blind like this.
@ArkansasDad and @lkj2643 You should check with the schools and ask what happens if they win outside scholarships. Some schools will allow them to stack on top of grant and institutional scholarships $$. Others will simply reduce their offers and you will see $0 reduction in your total costs. There is no one size fits all answer. You have to check school by school.
Great point about not being able to “stack awards”… assuming the student is receiving need-based FA
We are in the same boat. D’s acceptances range from $0 net to $31,000/net, per year. Her top 3 choices range from $6600-$16,000. She has applied for many outside scholarships, but won’t know any of them until late May/June. Most HS scholarships aren’t renewable, so I’m considering them gravy $. I do wish scholarship notifications and the May 1 acceptance date better aligned.
Mom2,
We have researched a bit on the outside scholarship route. It appears that since many of them are still in the $20K area because of out of state tuition, there is no way we can reach the bottom line cost, let alone the printed COA. The cheapest route is still $8k in the red on the COA, so if we surpass that, we know that they will reduce their aid to match what we pulled in to not surpass that. We have all merit aid, we have two places that offered some work study and at one location a financial aid grant. All other places, including our top 3 are purely merit aid or out of state tuition waivers. They are cut and dried based on either test scores, GPA, honors program acceptances, etc. I think many on this website though, would definitely be in the boat you are talking about where private schools make package offers based on ability to pay/merit and it is understood that if they have provided financial aid, that they will reduce that if you have other sources.
I would not be surprised if it were common to handle it differently from either of the above, by using outside scholarships to replace unmet need, student loans, and work study or work earning expectations first, but then reduce financial aid grants before reducing (institutional) EFC.
I.e. outside scholarships up to the amount of unmet need, student loans, and work study or work earning expectations would reduce net price, but amounts beyond that would not, unless they were so large that they exceed all financial need. Examples:
http://financialaid.stanford.edu/aid/outside/
https://students.ucsd.edu/finances/financial-aid/types/scholarships/
But each school may have its own policy different from other schools.