<p>I understand that Ivy's, D3s including NESCAC only have need based scholarships. Has anyone seen any coach influence in procuring any non need-based - academic/other scholarships in schools like ivies, D3's like Carnegie Mellon, UChicago, NESCAC, MIT etc ? Is it even worthwhile to discuss with coaches ? any experiences and amounts would be appreciated. Thanks.</p>
<p>Our only experience is with football recruiting at several Ivy schools and CMU. While the three Ivy shools offered very generous financial aid. CMU’s financial aid is based on FAFSA and we were infomed that, based on our financial information, we had no need. That alone was enough to make the school decision for our son.</p>
<p>OP, are you asking if the coaches at schools that have a stated “need-based only” policy may have access to other types of scholarships for their athletes? I’ve never heard of that. The only time I’ve heard an athlete get an improved FA offer is if they can document a better (need-based) FA offer from a competing school.</p>
<p>I have not heard of any merit aid at Ivies.</p>
<p>However, I have heard of athletes requesting their FA package, that is, need-based, to be reviewed with the coach’s support. But I do not think it would fly at any school that already meets 100% of need.</p>
<p>I don’t think going beyond 100% of need would be possible, but a school like CMU which to the best of my knowledge rarely gives 100% of need could be convinced. In fact, they pretty much say that if you aren’t ED, they will try to match other FA packages to get you to go to CMU, if the CMU package is not better.</p>
<p>@varska and @rhandco, we are in a situation where based on our financial information, we probably would not qualify for any need based FA. So, we are not looking for more than 100%, but trying to minimize the $60k pa cost.
@Alipac - how is it that even though ivies and CMU all have need based FA policies; yet ivies were able to offer a generous aid while CMU could not - with the same financial information. I can understand it might be a differential of 10-20%; but looks like it was 0% and generous in your case.</p>
<p>@FatherOf2015TX, even within the Ivies, you may find a very large difference in the size of the FA award. It depends on the endowment size per student. A family earning 135K may receive a grant of 30K from Princeton and only 10K from Brown.</p>
<p>The Ivys that recruited my son vary in their financial aid policies. The one he attends “meets full financial need” with no loans. The other two offered to meet any of the HYP offers. </p>
<p>I think that the Ivys have different definitions of “financial need” and formulas for calculating the financial aid packages. CMU was pretty straight forward. Fill out the FAFSA application and we would love to have you on the team if you get in to the school and can afford it. He got in, but the $0 financial aid was tough to overcome. If the financial aid was reversed, the decision would have been much more difficult. </p>
<p>“Meets full need” definitely means different things at different schools. For example, for two years we had kids in Princeton and Duke concurrently, and both meet full need, but Princeton was more generous.</p>