When outside scholarships are awarded to a student that has a full ride scholarship, what happens? I believe in the case of non-merit financial assistance awards that the outside awards reduce the schools’s FA amount, but what happens when a student is awarded a merit-based full ride? Or is it completely different for every school?
Also, most of the outside scholarships my son has applied to do not list restrictions on how the money is to be spent. Are these checks written to the university, held in a student account, then spent by the student? Do they need to get approval to spend the money on certain things?
Just curious how it generally works…
Thanks in advance, this part is new to me and the search function yeilded few answers.
I’m not sure but I think it depends on the school how they handle it.
Will outside scholarships stack or will they reduce their awards?
A full ride might pay for tuition, fees, room and board (certain options), some might cover books.
It might be a specific amount and not increase with cost increases.
So the outside scholarships might cover a more expensive housing option, increases in tuition and fees, books.
Then the rest might be refunded to the student for travel or personal expenses.
Scholarships in excess of tuition, fees, books are taxable income to the student and unearned income of more than $2100 is taxed at the parent rate (kiddie tax, form 8615).
So a student with a significant scholarship that covers room, board, travel, personal expenses might have quite a tax burden.
Depends on the school and how their scholarships are worded. Texas Tech offers a full ride for NMF (which includes everything including transportation and incidentals) they said that they would reduce their scholarship by the amount of any outside scholarship. UTD offers enough money for NMF to effectively make it a full ride but they don’t call it a full ride. They do allow you to stack outside scholarships and extra scholarship money is refunded to the student. OU’s national merit is not a full ride but very generous and they say they will stack scholarships and also refund any unused money to the students. I have heard that students that are NMF and work as RAs make money from their scholarships.
Full ride scholarships rarely cover transportation or personal expenses, so outside awards might cover those costs.
Some schools (often privates) will sometimes note in their scholarship pages that merit cannot exceed a certain amount, so outside merit reduces their merit. For instance, they may say that total merit cannot exceed tuition. So if the student got a full tuition award, and then also got a $5k award, then the tuition award would be reduced $5k. The schools that do that are just trying to be able to offer as many students some help as they can.