I am working with an organization to set up a scholarship for our local high school. The donor wants the scholarship to go to a student with financial need preferably.
In talking to the guidance department, for all the other small local scholarships they have, they tell me they evaluate need informally. If a student is on free/reduced lunch then obviously that works. We also can look at the address and see what area of town the student lives in. (Although there can certainly be extenuating circumstances on both sides, this can be a good indicator in our town - we have low income apartments/rowhomes and $1 million single family homes less than a mile from each other) And often teachers or counselors know the students families enough to know who is truly struggling and who is not.
The donor is asking if we can require a FAFSA form to verify income. Guidance says of course we can require it but they have never had a scholarship that requires it. They worry that will prevent a lot of kids from applying.
So - my question is, is this a common requirement for small scholarships? Think things like the local Rotary or local bank, who wants to give $1000 or $2000 to a graduating senior.
I have sat on the scholarship committee for a local organization- and we did not (and they do not currently) require FAFSA. Part of the application asks for a letter from the guidance counselor, school principal or other “adult” (we frequently get letters from social workers) and these letters usually address both what makes the kid special AND describes the need.
I don’t think I ever read an application from someone even borderline where you’d worry they were trying to game the system. My community is like yours- very diverse housing stock located cheek by jowl so the address is sometimes misleading but teachers and others who wrote letters found a diplomatic way to address the kids financial need. There were athletes who wouldn’t have eaten breakfast before weekend matches but for a coach who regularly bought boxes of cereal and small boxes of milk “for the entire bus”. There were kids on robotics teams who couldn’t afford the $4 train ticket to a competition if not for parent advisors who would buy multi-trip passes and announce “if anyone forgot their wallet just see me for a ticket”. And kids who had already been accepted to fantastic "meets full need "colleges but without our help couldn’t buy the kind of clothes you need for a winter in Hanover NH or Middlebury VT.
Kudos to you!!! If the donor realizes how solid the relationships are between guidance/teachers/kids you can probably convince him/her that FAFSA isn’t necessary. Teachers who have been buying their students food, mittens, socks, etc. are heroes AND know which families do not have a penny to spare.
My son applied for five outside academic scholarships, and one required the FAFSA to verify need. These scholarships were more at regional and national levels, and financial need was not the primary component in most of them.
The FAFSA can be the most neutral/fair way to assess need, I guess. It takes assumptions out of the picture. And, all kids who need or want financial aid for college have to complete the FAFSA anyway, so you would not be requiring extra work for them, other than asking them make a copy of the report, which could be done at school.
In the end, the FAFSA determined that our family had no need, and my son did not win the scholarship that required the form.
D graduated in 2015 and I remembering several of the applications asking for the EFC from FAFSA. If I were donating money or sitting on a scholarship committee and wanted to consider need, I like the idea of FAFSA better than relying on guidance counselors. That’s too subjective in my mind and also injects favoritism and subjectivity into the process.
I should clarify that while the scholarships I mentioned above were local/regional/national, they were targeted to relatively small numbers of students (200 or so applicants) and the amounts awarded were similar to a Rotary Club scholarship. My son won three that ranged from $3K to $20K. But some students got as low as $250. Bottom line: I don’t think that a FAFSA requirement is unheard of or unreasonable for a smallish need-based scholarship. If the donor wants to use the FAFSA, I would do that. Then you know you are comparing apples to apples.
I have done work on fundraising, awarding scholarships, and creating scholarship applications for quite a few volunteer organizations and foundations in the past. We actually never required the FAFSA, but that was long ago, maybe before the FAFSA even existed!
Given your community’s economic profile, I’d encourage you to accept FAFSA. It’s not going to be a hardship on students and their families since, if they are needy, they will be filling it out anyway. The counselors’ objections confuse me. I wonder if they like having the power to steer scholarship awards to kids they favor. You might help some kids by evening the playing field with FAFSA.
Also, there may be kids living on the “good side” of town whose families are in dire straights due to unemployment, illness, divorce, business failure, etc. People who aren’t used to being poor may not know (or are too embarrassed) to inform their kids’ schools about their changed situation.
Hopefully the scholarship application would be due and awarded in the spring of HS senior year? By that point, the FAFSA is due for colleges anyway. And I think I heard that the FAFSA is now available earlier for people to complete - Oct 1 rather than January 1.
How are you going to require it? If it is just a copy of the SAR, it might work. If you somehow want an official copy that might be difficult. Also, your organization would have to have a way to keep all the application material confidential.
If you require FAFSA, your are excluding students who aren’t eligible, non documented or foreign students. Your organization may choose to do that, many do, but they should just be aware of that consequence.
Easy – have the applicant fill out the online PDF version, print it out and hand it in.
Not if any applicant can do as I suggest above. The “big” local scholarship organization in my town (lots of awards, but not for lots of money) requires the FAFSA as part of the application, and this is how they do it. It’s not rocket surgery.
But if you just print off the FAFSA from a PDF and it is not processed, there will be no calculations made. If they are going to do that, why not just require a tax form and bank statements? This sounds like a small scholarship. Will the committee want to do all the calculations and make the judgment, or just use the SAR info to show need?
Exactly. It’s a standard form, widely used and widely available. Most scholarship applicants have probably already completed the online version anyway, so the necessary information is at hand.
All of D’s applications for local scholarships asked for income, household size. Some wanted a copy of tax return (we blacked out soc sec numbers). Some asked for EFC.
But if it is not actually filed, why require the ‘standard form’ (standard for who?). How would it be any different than submitting a tax form that hadn’t actually been prepared for the IRS, just filled out, unofficially? Why should the scholarship committee have to do the calculations for those not submitting it?
If the scholarship committee just wants tax info, ask for it, or have its own form asking for the information it wants. Why use a form that is designed to be submitted online and run through a calculation to produce an EFC?