<p>Hello everyone :),
I applied to Tulane EA and got the 20k Academic Achievement Award.
I'm expecting to pay for college myself and this probably isn't enough, so is there any way I could up this number?
Basically, is there anything else I can do with Tulane to increase the amount of aid?
Also can I use scholarships from places like fastweb or scholarship.com to pay along with the merit aid I got?
Thank you very much for reading</p>
<p>Hi viridianforest. There are a few things to address here.</p>
<p>First, getting merit aid adjusted upward is fairly rare but not impossible. The key is if you have first semester grades that are well above your overall overage (e.g. you got 4 A’s and two A-'s this semester while your overall GPA UW is 3.6) and/or you raise you SAT/ACT score substantially. The two together are especially compelling. What doesn’t work is saying that you got better offers from other schools. This isn’t a car dealership.</p>
<p>Second, you can absolutely use any other scholarships you receive from private sources. I am not familiar with the two you name, but it doesn’t matter. Those are your assets and have nothing to do with Tulane in this specific sense. However, if you do get outside scholarships it will affect any need-based aid you apply for, precisely because those are assets, and even more they are assets that go 100% towards your college costs.</p>
<p>Which leads to my third point, are you going to apply for need based aid? Because you might be thinking that aid based on financial need is all loans. But in fact in many cases it is more grant money than anything else, and grant money, like merit scholarships, do not have to be paid back. The difference is the amount of grant money can vary from year to year as financial circumstances and other factors change. The merit money, as you read in your letter, is fixed for 4 years as long as you maintain your grades and stay out of trouble.</p>
<p>So for example, let’s say you fill out all the paperwork and it turns out that Tulane determines that your family ought to be able to contribute $10,000 a year towards your college expenses (excluding your merit money). You say you expect to pay for yourself, I will address that below. Let’s also say the cost of attending Tulane is $60,000. This means that you would still need to come up with $60,000-$10,000-$20,000=$30,000. That is your need-based aid number. Tulane doesn’t promise to meet that 100%, but let’s say they do. It is possible that there might be $8,000 in loans, $5,000 in work-study, and the remaining $17,000 is a grant. Now remember I am just making up all these numbers. But in this case, then, you and your family would have to decide if coming out of Tulane with approximately $32,000 in debt is a worthwhile proposition. Keep in mind that the amount of grant money could increase and the loan money decrease if you perform very well in school, or at least so I have heard.</p>
<p>Back to paying for college yourself. Unless you are emancipated or there are other unusual circumstances, schools do not absolve parents from the equation of paying for college. I am no expert in this area by any means, but as far as I know even if your parents are divorced there is an expectation that both sides will contribute if they have the means. I honestly don’t know what happens if they just refuse to fill out the paperwork, but I guess it might just grind everything to a halt as far as need-based aid. Maybe someone that has been through the process can address this, I was fortunate enough that neither of my kids have had to have need-based aid. So I mostly know what I have seen on here, and I haven’t really studied what happens in different situations on other threads. This might all be moot if you were not going to apply for need-based aid, but it sounded like you probably were.</p>
<p>Sorry to ramble, just trying to cover the bases. We can get more specific now that you know some of the parameters.</p>
<p>Thank you so much for your detailed response!</p>
<p>So if I raise my grades and ACT/SAT substantially this semester in high school, I should contact the admissions office? Can merit also be adjusted upward while attending Tulane?</p>
<p>Also thanks for the explanation of the financial aid. I am definitely applying for it, I just don’t really know what the results will be.</p>
<p>Yes to contacting admissions if you have new stats that you think might be impactful. Actually contact your specific admissions counselor directly. If you don’t know who that is, go to [Tulane</a> Admission: Meet Your Counselor](<a href=“http://admission.tulane.edu/counselors/]Tulane”>http://admission.tulane.edu/counselors/) and use the right side of the screen.</p>
<p>No to having the merit award adjusted after you enroll. Just isn’t the way they (or anyone else as far as I know) do it. But as I mentioned before, my strong impression is that they handle this by increasing the ratio of grant money to loans if you are doing very well at Tulane, assuming you are getting need-based aid. Performance matters, I guess. But definitely try to get some expert advice on the need-based applications and process.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for all your advice!
It was amazingly helpful :)</p>
<p>Does anyone know what happens to merit awards that are given to students who end up going to other schools? Does that money get offered to admitted students who had not already received merit $?</p>
<p>Prozack2, I don’t know for sure but I would think they offer merit aid based on the fact that all who are offered don’t enroll. FC might know better…</p>
<p>You are correct LINYMOM. Just like with the DHS where they offer 75 students the full tuition, they know that usually about half will actually accept. They do not go down the list of “runners-up” and offer it to them. Numerous reasons. Not only is it budgeted that way, but the timing doesn’t work. They may not find out until May 1 those students are not coming and it is too late by then. But even if that were not true, the awards are based on the students meeting certain criteria, even if that criteria is a bit more cryptic this year. It would be antithetical to the spirit of the awards to just run down the list until a certain budget was used up.</p>
<p>But the bottom line is that they probably come pretty close to whatever they have budgeted every year, based on the same models they use for admissions in general.</p>
<p>The blog posting “Dear Tulane – Send $” explains how this works. </p>
<p>[Tulane</a> University Admission Blog - Jeff](<a href=“http://tuadmissionjeff.blogspot.com/]Tulane”>http://tuadmissionjeff.blogspot.com/)</p>