Merit scholarships

<p>I received a $19,250 merit scholarship and a $7,192 grant. I was very surprised to receive such substantial financial aid, but it would still cost more to go to RHIT than UMich OOS with $30K/yr.</p>

<p>Is financial aid being mailed now?</p>

<p>Just received my financial aid award letter from RHIT. It is a little more than 12k in merit, which is expected due to the FAFSA EFC hovering at 89k. However, there is no way I would want my parents spending that kind of money on school for me. I will be heading down to UCSD this fall unless Cal Poly SLO decides to admit me off the waitlist within the next 5 weeks.</p>

<p>Good luck and best wishes to everyone!</p>

<p>30,000 - 40,000 per year is way too much to pay for undergraduate school. My dad says to save your money for graduate school for when it counts.</p>

<p>@freshmansenior: good advice from your dad…he just might be surprised to learn that no RHIT grad with at least a 3.2 GPA has had to pay for grad school in the last 12 years. Yes, that is accounting for every graduate. I had four seniors who were tour guides for me who went on to grad school in 2011. Two went to Georgia Tech, one went to Cornell, and one went to Notre Dame. Worst deal any of them got was being PAID $30,000 per year to get advanced degree(s).</p>

<p>Son received his award letter today. Heartbreaker. We’re willing to spend every penny that we can, but I’m still not sure that we’ll be able to swing the amount that we are expected to pay. Rose has always been his first choice and he’s worked so hard in high school that it stinks to have to steer him in another direction. Other schools’ offers leave us paying much less - CW, IIT, Rensselaer - so he’s lucky to have options. My husband feels that the award amount reflects the interest a school has in a student - not merely a matter of budget - so clearly Rose doesn’t want him as much as the other schools. Can anyone speak to this?</p>

<p>does it come by US mail or some courier service?</p>

<p>@mommysallright - I agree that the award demonstrates a school’s interest in a student, but you also can’t compare apples to oranges. One school’s aid can’t really be compared to anothers.</p>

<p>What you can find out is what the max aid award is at a school, what the average aid is, and what percentage of students are given aid. Based on that information you can guage the award you received based on the awards others received. I was also told by another parent that Rose waits to give aid until they process the FAFSA so that they are not awarding merit based aid to students that qualify for need based aid. So my son was awarded around $25K, but about half of that was in the form of a need based grant. If we wouldn’t have qualified for the grant, then perhaps his merit award would have been higher.</p>

<p>@jrcsmom - you are absolutely right, there is no apples to apples comparison for the award amounts from one school to another. this is especially true when you look at the value of the education that the school provides. rose, for our son, appears to give the best ‘bang for our buck’ - we just have to find enough bucks to make this happen.</p>

<p>how do you find out what the max award is at the school? i saw cowtownslim’s post about ‘section n line h’ and i must admit i didn’t follow. thanks your advice and good luck to your son! hopefully, we’ll run into each other on parent’s weekend at RHIT!</p>

<p>@ bystander95014 - we received our letter through usps. hope you receive yours soon.</p>

<p>@bystander95014 It comes by US Mail</p>

<p>@mommysallright I’m sorry to hear that the aid package didn’t work out. Your husband is not alone is his belief, but what jrcsmom says is correct. If two schools are each going for 500 freshman students and School A has a merit aid budget of $7.5 million while School B has a budget of $5 million, the average awards are going to be $15,000 and $10,000 respectively. If an admitted student is in the top academic scholarship tier at both schools (I won’t even get into the difference in academic quality at different schools), that might mean $23,000 at School A and $17,000 at School B. Does School A want want the student more than School B? No. They have both extended the maximum award that their budgets/governing boards allow.</p>

<p>This whole process is a real pain, frankly. It would be really nice if every school simply dropped their sticker price by their average merit award amount, did away with the whole scholarship game, and only offered need-based aid. Families could then go into the process of applying with a MUCH clearer idea of what the specific cost range is going to be.</p>

<p>One correction to jrcsmom: we don’t even require the FAFSA to be awarded merit-based aid. We aren’t looking to see what you can “afford” before we offer a scholarship. If we did, it wouldn’t be merit-based aid. It would be what some schools like to call “holistic”. Merit is one process. FAFSA based aid is another. Both are independent of each other and stack together.</p>

<p>RHIT Admissions contact: My D hasn’t received anything yet (we’re in the South). Does that mean that there is no merit aid for her, or have all the packages not yet been sent?</p>

<p>Twinsin2012 - I’d also like to know answer about the merit packages. I also have twins who are accepted to Rose and we also haven’t received anything in mail.</p>

<p>No twins for us-- but we are also anxiously waiting to hear about merit aid-- hope it is coming soon.</p>

<p>By the way, the logic of what RHITAdmissions says is spot on-- there is an awful lot of stress and confusion from what I can tell relating to these merit aid decisions. There should be a better way.</p>

<p>Aid packages are still being processed and mailed out. Will continue into next week. Keep looking in the mail.</p>

<p>What about grants vs merit aid? Are the grants need based and the merit awards…merit based for lack of a better term…or are the grants merit based as well? Sorry, just a tad confused.</p>

<p>@Cutzhaus</p>

<p>Yes, grants are need-based with the FAFSA as the basis. Scholarships are merit-based awards with the student’s accomplishments as the basis.</p>

<p>I can’t believe RHITAdmissions suggesting to drop merit scholarships and just award based on need. Really? How do you expect to attract the brightest students. We have done everything right (worked hard, live in a small modest house, and put money away since the birth of our children for college). As a result – our EFC is high. Merit scholarships reward our bright hardworking son. As a result, part of making his college choice is who is going to offer him the most merit.</p>

<p>@proudmom1313</p>

<p>Whoa, whoa, whoa. You only cited half of what I said. The first half is even more important. Here is where I am coming from…</p>

<p>The mystery and gamesmanship of the whole scholarship process creates far more stress to an already stressful experience. Removing as many of the games and stresses for students is what I feel should be done. I have seen year after year families and students confused, bewildered, and upset by a process that changes from school to school and from year to year.</p>

<p>I got a call from the mother of the valedictorian at a well known private high school in Indianapolis just the other day. This student only applied to one school with the mistaken understanding that s/he was a perfect candidate for a significant scholarship offered by the school. The online description of the scholarship criteria seemed to match perfectly. Unfortunately, the online description was outdated by 18 months, and the criteria had since been changed from a purely merit-based assessment to a “holistic” assessment. The student didn’t get the scholarship the family was counting on and now they are in scramble mode.</p>

<p>Scholarships are nothing more than big coupons (sometimes with real dollars behind them, othertimes not). If there wasn’t the “mark up” in tuition only to discount it with a scholarship, every family could know before even submitting an application what the cost range would be for every college in the country. Currently a family doesn’t see the “mark up” in tuition before scholarship offers. They only see the “discount” they receive in the form of the scholarship. So what I said was that it would be nice if BOTH the mark up and the discount could be done away with.</p>

<p>Every family could then research schools in the their specific cost window for the best program in the student’s academic interest area(s). No more falling in love with a school hoping to receive enough scholarship only to be elated or dejected later. The decision will then be based purely on the school’s value per dollar in cost. Top students would still be attracted to top programs. Only now their families will be able to find the programs that provide the most bang for all those bucks they have been saving away.</p>

<p>All that said, none of this will ever happen. Why? Because until the process was mainstream and generally accepted, it would rightly be recognized to be hurting the top 5-10% academic kids. The out of pocket cost for the family would most likely be higher without the scholarship process in place. While I would love to remove the games and stresses that come with the process, I am equally against removing incentives for high achievement. A student like your son deserves to be rewarded equal to his accomplishments. So now speaking as an official Rose-Hulman representative, I can tell you that is exactly what our scholarship process will strive to do.</p>

<p>Dear RHITAdmissions: I’m going to have to disagree with how Rose-Hulman did actually present their scholarships. Although I was pleased with our offer (I didn’t expect as much doing my research), I did feel like your offer was more of a “discount”. Other schools mailed their merit scholarships to my son before the financial aid package was given. In fact, his number one school mailed an acceptance, then a merit scholarship, then notificiation of a special program scholarship and still we haven’t been given the financial aid package and we don’t care. The scholarships truely awarded my son and we know exactly how much we need to fork out. That seems like the best way to handle merit scholarships to me – they have nothing to do with need and the consumer/student knows exactly what is on the table.</p>