<p>How does Georgetown handle outside scholarships. Specifically, GT is now around 57K. If the EFC is $30,000 and if student gets a $40,000 scholarship over 4 years (ie, 10K per year), where does the $10K get applied?</p>
<p>Is it the case that the EFC remains at 30K and the 10K gets applied to the college scholarship. Or the 10K gets applied to the EFC and the family is now responsible for 20?. I have been told that it is the second scenario that would occur which then begs the question whether these outside scholarships are helpful for anyone getting need-based help as it makes no difference with regards to the EFC.
Thanks</p>
<p>The process is a bit technical, but what it boils down to is this. Georgetown gives financial aid in a variety of forms. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll just talk about 3 of them: Loans, Work Study, and Grants. Of these, grants are obviously the “best” while loans are the “worst”. No one ever gets a financial aid package consisting exclusively of grants.</p>
<p>So, let’s say that you have an EFC of 30k and financial aid will be kicking in the other 27k. That means that your financial aid package might look something like a 4k work study award, a 13k loan, and a 10k scholarship/grant from Georgetown (these aren’t real numbers, but based on my knowledge of Georgetown financial aid, your package would probably work out to something like this). What this means is that you’re effectively getting only 10k from Georgetown, you either have to work for the rest (work study) or pay it back later (loan).</p>
<p>If you come in with a 10k outside scholarship, it applies to the loans and work study first (I can’t remember exactly, but I seem to recall that you get to pick which to reduce). So, with your 10k you can knock the loan down from 13k to 3k. So, while your outside scholarship doesn’t reduce your EFC, it does still reduce your cost.</p>
<p>The only time that an outside scholarship becomes “worthless” is once it starts to eat into the grant portion of your financial aid, so say you got a 20k scholarship, then you would in fact lose some of your Georgetown grants, but the fact of the matter is that loans and work study always play a large role in funding packages, so outside scholarship do help you out.</p>