I’m also curious about this. Total aid being received is usually the sum of the need-based grant, work study, loans–and merit aid. Are people seeing merit $$ (dean’s, provost’s or presidential scholarships) in their financial aid letter? I just see a “need-based” grant. Does merit aid come out later? My daughter was TO and has an almost perfect GPA with high rigor in coursework, so…just wondering.
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Based on conversations here, it seems any major merit (Presidential/Provost) would have been presented in the admissions decision letter, and that smaller merit grants (Bronco/Dean) would be in the financial aid letter.
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D23 received her letter. Got $25k need-based grant/gift aid. Is this aka merit aid? I don’t believe we qualify for need based aid.
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Are all the merit scholarships named? Perhaps if the fin aid letters only mention a dollar amount they are need-based? Maybe merit comes later?
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Did you get it by mail or is it in portal? I don’t see anything.
Where do you see the amount?
I don’t see it either! We didn’t submit FAFSA though…
In your portal, it should say you have a “Status Update” in the same area that the original “Status Update” with the admission decision was found. If you click on the link provided, it will bring you to your financial aid award, a PDF document.
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I clicked that but it directs me to the offer letter PDF. No financial aid information. I am so dumb that I forgot to submit CSS. I thought it would be the same as FAFSA. Does that mean we didn’t get anything and have to pay the full price? Not even merit scholarship? Yikes.
DD only got Dean’s scholarship. 4.0uw, 5.4 w, high test score. Very disappointed. We can’t afford scu @81k without significant merit. Bummer.
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Can you negotiate with admission office?
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I am not sure how that works. I heard some schools won’t negotiate merit at all. I suppose we can always ask.
We did file FAFSA, but realized that we had not filed CSS. We filed it last night. Did anyone have a line item that either had “Merit” or a name of a merit scholarship?
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We filed FAFSA and CSS. On my daughter’s package she received a large merit and a small need. Both were listed in the grants and scholarship section.
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Plus, I’m not sure how we qualified for any need based but we’ll take it.
Same here D23 only got Dean and also has high stats. Very disappointing. We got much higher merit with other offers
How much is Dean’s scholarship?
On Reddit (so take with a grain of salt) it was reported that SCU received over 1,000 applications from students with a 4.0+ GPA this admission cycle, which may explain why fewer high-stat applicants are being offered much merit (at least anecdotally here).
Over the summer in an admissions presentation/tour someone asked about negotiating aid offers (which seemed kind of cheeky at the time) and were told that they have more students wanting to commit than spaces, and that they ‘do not’ negotiate aid, but best of luck to you in trying.
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Santa Clara University sent out admission decisions to a record 10,586 early applicants this fall, an increase of over 24 percent from last year. 49% of early applicants were admitted.
Stats in the article:
- They report an average unweighted GPA of 3.86
- 49 percent are students of color
- 54 percent of students are from outside California
- More than 350 students are the first in their family to attend college
- Almost 9 percent of students are living outside the U.S.
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Our experience for D20 was that she got significantly more merit aid at Chapman, LMU and others (I can’t remember off hand) than she did at SCU. She got a small amount from SCU and we went back and asked for more–and they gave us a slight bump (maybe another $2K?)–but that might have been because it was March of 2020 and their numbers could have been off due to the pandemic. In general, I don’t think they offer as much merit aid as other schools. As I’ve said up-thread, D chose SCU (despite better financial offers from other schools) and we’ve never looked back. It’s been a great fit!
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