@privateID Clearly I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand you. Thanks for posting just the numbers. Looks like your out of pocket did go down. Congrats!
@privateID I think you are right that your story could help others. But people should remember that different schools handle this kind of thing differently. In our experience, sometimes schools even do thing differently than they originally told you. ?
My D’s school is “no loan”. She received some financial aid including grants and work study. Two months later they awarded her a university merit scholarship. When I call to ask how it would affect her financial aid, they told me that university merit scholarships stack on top of financial aid with no reduction, and that outside scholarships would reduce financial aid by 50 cents on the dollar. However when she received a $2,500 outside scholarship later, we never saw any reduction in financial aid – a pleasant surprise!
Knowing how the school will treat inside and outside scholarships can make a big difference to the bottom line as you are deciding which school is more affordable.
This is a question we’re definitely going to bring up with the financial aid departments at all the schools we’re considering. DS is getting a scholarship from his high school but we won’t know the award amount until March or April. If we end up choosing a school that will reduce other aid, we may very well just deny the scholarship so it goes back to the HS to be used for someone else. We’re not applying to any meets full need schools though.
If an outside scholarship replaces need based grants, or wipes all need based aid, make sure that financial aid keeps that file open for the student regarding the aid award. Some schools are not as generous to upperclassmen applying for financial aid when they did not as freshman and some even outright won’t give it. There should be no misunderstanding about the fact that the student applied and got financial aid, but the outside award preempted it. Sadly, I’ve seen this misunderstanding actually happen several times.