<p>Award letter from 2 different SUNYS, one offers a Perkins loan, one doesn't. One offers $750 more for work study.</p>
<p>Not at all clear on this discrepancy especially the Perkins loan issue.</p>
<p>Anyone have any experience with this?</p>
<p>It is up tp the college.</p>
<p>Schools have limited perkins loans funds. Not all schools disburse these funds the same way</p>
<p>If these are federal loans, I’m not sure I understand why one SUNY offers it and the other doesn’t?</p>
<p>The SUNYs do not guarantee to meet financial need so you can get various packages from them. It really doesn’t matter what you get, but what you end up having to pay. So get the bottom line cost for each college. Then you have to decide whether you prefer borrowing the money via the Perkins which does not accrue interest while you are in school, or take the work study. I have found that most of the time, you can get a job on campus anyways, and would take the Perkins. If you are also down for some non subsidized Stafford loans, you can work and if you have excess, start paying the interest on them so that your loan burden is not increasing from that interest accrual. Sometimes, the Stafford will give some financial incentives for doing this as well.</p>
<p>
Perkins loans are federal but are what is called campus based aid (SEOG and Work Study are also campus based aid). Each school is given a set amount of funds for campus based aid and once they have used that they can not get any more. Each school must decide how best to disburse the money and each will have their own criteria for awarding it and will set their own maximum. So each school will vary enormously in how they award the money. For instance at my son’s school the maximum SEOG award was $200, while at my daughter’s school it was $2,000. Also as funds are limited a student may qualify but not get any because the funds have run out. </p>
<p>This is different to other loans like Stafford and grants like Pell. They are not campus based and do not run out. A student gets what they are eligible based on their EFC.</p>