Another thread began talking about merit scholarships versus need-based financial aid and their effect on students, parents, and colleges. This thread is for continuing the discussion that started approximately here:
As someone said over on the other thread, the term “merit aid” is a misnomer designed to flatter applicants. I prefer to think of it as “discretionary aid” - the recipients and amounts are determined at the school’s discretion, based on factors that will likely never be quantified or even identified publicly. Which is fine, it’s their prerogative to allocate financial aid budgets as they see fit. I would just prefer more clarity and transparency about what’s going on.
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There are schools that publish auto merit numbers and are transparent about the thresholds to qualify. They just aren’t the popular colleges here on CC.
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Fair point - many state flagships in particular have gone this route. Arizona, Kansas, Mizzou, and Nebraska come to mind in my experience, but I know there are many others. Kudos.
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Muhlenberg and Sarah Lawrence are transparent about merit aid in their calculators - and that’s a significant reason that my daughter is applying to both schools. It’s so refreshing that they don’t play games.
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Transparency in merit scholarships (or admission) is easier to implement when selectivity is lower, and there is not a flood of applicants compressed at the top of the stat range who will overflow the scholarship budget (or admission class in the case of admission).
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One thing I only recently realized about merit/discretionary aid is that it is a form of price guarantee in a way that need-based aid is not. Looking at an expensive private with $60k tuition, and they would give $40k in need-based aid. If they then give $20k as “merit”, it is telling the family that even if their financial picture changed over the 4 years, they wouldn’t risk being on the hook for the full $60k/yr (more like $70k after 4 years). So merit is not only flattering, but it does have some financial benefits over pure need-based aid.
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But note that merit scholarships may have their own continuation / renewal requirements, such as maintaining a college GPA. Maintaining a 3.0 college GPA may not be so hard for a student at the top end of the entering class, but maintaining a 3.5 college GPA may be more stressful and encourage “GPA protection” habits that can be detrimental to academic exploration.
First semester frosh year is the riskiest time for GPA requirements, since the student may be adjusting to college in many ways, and may be overconfident and not realize that an A in college is usually harder to earn than an A in high school.
Individual students may face more risk one way or the other, depending on the circumstances. Such circumstances include the continuation / renewal GPA of the merit scholarship and the predictability of family finances for need-based aid.
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And many colleges will give a merit range and sometimes provide guidance about average students receiving merit etc. That being said, it is too much of a mystery and contributes to the larger number of applications that today’s student submits.
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My kids both picked colleges that had merit for certain grades/scores and that was a big reason we could afford those schools. They also needed the need based aid, but most schools don’t give enough in the need based area to make them affordable for even many middle income families.
The one who picked a private school needed the academic aid (from the chart), the state aid (BF when it wasn’t 100%), state grants, federal grants, and finally an athletic scholarship. Could she have received enough in need based aid from a T20? No. Did I have enough to pay for her and her sister to both go to college at the same time? Not unless she went to an instate public school and she couldn’t then have played her sport (no teams at public schools except UF, which was ranked 4th in the nation at that time and she wasn’t of that caliper).
My kids benefited from need based aid, but I didn’t think they were more entitled to aid than a kid who earns a merit based scholarship. I’m fine with college offering merit if they want to attract students who have higher grades. If a school wants to offer need based aid to instate students only, I’m fine with that too.
There are a lot of kids who can’t afford to go to Harvard because they don’t receive enough need based aid. If a parent is newly making $150k, but historically hasn’t made that and hasn’t been able to put away savings for college, that parent isn’t going to be able to write a check for $30k-$60k per year, especially when another school is offering merit.
We have two big scholarship programs in this state. One has a need based component, so the students not only have to be smart but also have to have a pretty big financial need. I’m not sure I like that one better than the other program which is merit based only.
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I can see why some would appreciate transparency and auto merit. But I can also see how this might not be entirely satisfactory for admissions teams, especially for a college that is test optional. Some high schools have high rigor with no weighting. Students from schools with no grade inflation are at a big disadvantage. Also, the college might seek to attract students who have spent a lot of time contributing to their community or working – which inevitably impacts GPA.
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A lot of the replies here (and in the other thread) focus on the Merit Based part of the discussion, which is an important demographic. Swinging it back to the Need Based portion, my experience with S20 proved that the situation is even more precarious for families pursuing Need Based Aid at private universities.
The equivalent of “transparent” Merit charts is Meets Full Need. Unfortunately, there are very few schools that Meet Full Need and are not Need Aware. That leaves a huge swath of private universities that do not guarantee to Meet Full Need, which puts families with significant financial need in the position of figuring out which schools might meet the need of their children.
I’m not implying all private universities should meet the full financial need of every accepted student, no more than I’d expect automobile manufacturers to sell lower-income people new cars for $5000. The search for such colleges (that selectively Meet Full Need but do not guarantee it) is literally like finding a needle in a haystack.
There are no road maps. There are no guarantees. There is nothing but try, try, and try 20 more times. Whittier might meet the Financial Need of 20 lower-income accepted students, but not the other 200. And there are no stated guaranteed criteria to help families determine whether or not to apply to Whittier for their specific student. The same for Elon, and St Louis University, and Eckerd, and St Joseph’s, and Marist, and Creighton, and another 800 colleges.
I wish it was as easy for us to run 40 NPCs, cross 25 off the list, then apply to the remaining 15 - knowing that any will be affordable after decision day. When applying to a school that does not guarantee to Meet Full Need (but does for some lower-income applicants,) the NPC is utterly useless. The school cannot create an algorithm that provides an accurate estimate because the process for deciding which lower-income applicants will receive the life-changing award is almost completely opaque.
And it’s possible the schools themselves do not even have a “process”. Maybe they have 100 qualified applicants (lower-income, capable of doing the work but are not extremely high-stats students, appear to be a good “fit” for the campus, etc) but can fund only 15 such applicants. Those 15 receive a Financial Aid package that makes enrollment affordable, but the other 85 equally fine applicants are either denied admission or admitted with unaffordable FinAid packages.
This isn’t a complaint about any part of the process. I’m simply shedding light on how the college application process is for families in need of significant Need Based aid for non-high-stats students who are not auto-admits into Meets Full Need universities. And I’m looking for families that have successfully navigated this terrain and ended with good results. I don’t see a lot of these examples on CC and I think it would be helpful to other such families just entering this process to read how others have gone about it in the recent past.
Good thread idea @ucbalumnus 
EDIT: edited to correct a couple of grammatical errors. “Logarithm” and “oblique”? Really? Oops
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Your point about incomes changing is a good one. I for one work partially on commission and a large part of my income can decline or increase at any time.
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However, these colleges that “meet full need” can and do define “need” however they want, so checking the net price calculator is still necessary.
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This is exactly right, and something those more knowledgeable in college admissions sometimes don’t even know…many schools that don’t meet full need will fully fund certain students they really want. And as a kicker, that student doesn’t have to have any need at all. But they may have need, even EFC 0. And I agree, there’s no way to predict where that might happen for a given student.
To further add to the lack of transparency in the process, some schools that don’t meet full need have deals with certain college access orgs to fully fund their admitted students…which clearly helps the college search for the counselors and students from those orgs, but doesn’t help others who don’t realize that U Wisconsin (to take one example) isn’t going to meet full need for any students who aren’t in one of these orgs.
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This seems like what is sometimes called “preferential packaging” of nominally need-based aid, which is sort of a stealth merit scholarship for the admit the college really wants hidden within need-based aid.
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True. And it could be the opposite. Stealth need aid hidden within merit aid. I reviewed dozens of universities’ criteria for assigning Need Based and Merit aid. For the majority of those I researched, there was no clear-cut criteria that made it easy to predict.
For some schools, my son was turned down for one of the named Full Tuition awards, but would then be offered enough combined Need+Merit aid to equal (or even surpass) those awards.
In the end, it seemed, like @Mwfan1921 said, the school (meaning AOs and whoever else is part of that decision making process) determine they want THAT applicant, and they mold various Need Based and Merit Based awards together to make sure finances aren’t the reason THAT applicant doesn’t enroll. I don’t know all the exact reasons, but fortunately for us my S20 was THAT applicant for several universities.
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This is how I perceive it too…and every year the applicant pool is different, so another reason families can’t predict how things will shake out (nor, to be fair, can the college enrollment mgmt staffs).
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Speaking for the side of the school, it’s often not possible to be “transparent” about merit aid awarding. Just like a company might offer a higher salary to candidate A than they would offer to candidate B, there are just times a school wants a particular student … and making it financially possible requires money.
I have worked at a public university with very clear policies on merit aid. Extra money was never offered to students in order to try to get them to enroll. But students would still complain that they didn’t get a top merit award. If 30 students are being considered for 10 awards, 20 students - all of whom are top students - will be disappointed. A number of them may complain about the process being unfair or not being transparent. The truth is, the committee could only choose 10. And that doesn’t mean that the other 20 weren’t deserving.
I have also worked at a school where I had quite a bit of latitude to award scholarships and grants in a manner that best allowed me to fill the class. I could not possibly have been transparent other than to say that money was awarded in a manner that allowed me to help the strongest accepted students to make the decision to enroll. While I understand that it makes it hard to know if a given student will get money, it’s what needs to happen to meet enrollment goals.
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But at need blind schools, the AO doesn’t know the need of the student. the AO may have influence on the merit awards but not on the need awards, the department award, or even the athletic or talent awards. If a school has auto merit, then the AO will know.