I want to warn current and future attendees of Georgetown (GU) about a policy of the Office of Student Financial Services that could result in lost scholarship dollars.
My daughter is starting as a freshman this year at GU. After getting her financial aid statement in late April, she aggressively pursued outside scholarships to bring the family responsibility number down. She was very successful, and was awarded at total of $14.5K to apply towards her first year. Our expectation was that the family responsibility would be reduced by this amount. When we looked at the latest financial aid statement earlier this month, we were unpleasantly surprised to see that this was not the case. Instead, the family responsibility was reduced by about $2K, the loans/work study totaling $6.5K were eliminated, and the remaining $6K essentially disappeared.
I fired off an email to get an explanation. The response was that their policy was that the family contribution cannot go lower than what is calculated by FAFSA. Their proposed solution was that we have the scholarship foundations defer the the payments to a later semester. In our case, this was not an option.
I told them that this situation defied common sense and fairness. These third-party scholarships are intended to directly benefit the deserving student who has undertaken the time and effort to pursue them. I pointed out the following quote from their website: “Your outside scholarships will be used to reduce first your family financial responsibility, if applicable, then your student loans or federal work study before any adjustment is made to your Georgetown scholarship.” I also told them that swapping out scholarship dollars for loans and work studies was not really appropriate, as these are not equivalents. All my arguments have fallen on deaf ears, and they have refused to make the adjustments that I think are needed. So we are in a position where we have lost the benefit of significant dollars and no longer have the incentive to pursue other scholarships in the future.
I write this primarily as a warning so that others may avoid this pitfall. I also would welcome any comments and suggestions from anyone who has had similar experiences. Thanks for reading this!
That is common practice at virtually all colleges. They determine your amount of need. If you get outside money then your need decreases. That’s why it is called need based aid.
I’m in a similar situation for Georgetown, and what I’ve found to be useful is to aggressively go after scholarships that issue checks paid out to me or my family, not the school. If the scholarship check is addressed to Georgetown University, I have to report it to financial aid and they adjust my aid package. If it’s addressed to me, though, there’s no need for me to report it to them and I can then use it for college expenses as needed. Unfortunately, almost all of the scholarships I’ve found that are addressed to the individual and not the university have been small, local scholarships. Still, you take what you can get.
We made sure to ask this question of the financial aid officer during college visits. Most said the same thing you are describing. Definitely something to consider.
It may be of interest to have a thread where the various school policies on outside scholarships are listed. My son’s University does not reduce financial aid in response to outside scholarships. That is one reason we selected that school.
This is absolutely NOT correct. You are required to report all grants and scholarships to the school if they are from outside sources. It is a requirement of the department of education.
To the OP, reducing the loans is certainly a benefit to you You now have that money as grants/scholarships that do not have to be repaid (and by the way, if you still want the loans to pay your EFC, you can get them at the low student rate).
This is very common, not specific to GTown. Certainly your kid benefits from getting rid of their loans. Some schools are worse than this in how they handle it.
Georgetown may be a bit more generous than many other colleges, since it allows the difference between their EFC and the federal EFC (as well as student loans and work study like many other colleges) to be offset by an outside scholarship, before reducing its own financial aid.
If this is actually somewhere on their web site, it obviously does not match what is in their bulletin. It is understandable why you feel like you were deceived.
Isn’t the actual quote “Tuition benefits external to Georgetown will be used to reduce or eliminate first your family financial responsibility, if applicable, then your student loans or federal work study before any adjustment is made to your Georgetown scholarship.”(https://finaid.georgetown.edu/financial-resources/outside-benefits)?
Tuition benefits for employees of other universities (assuming that is what it is referring to) are not the same as outside scholarships, although I agree this could easily be misunderstood since the entire page is linked as “Outside Benefits” and no specific statement appears to be made about how outside scholarships are treated even though you are encouraged to search for them.
It also might be regarded as somewhat questionable to treat educational insiders more favorably than the general public in this regard, if that is indeed the case, although the quote from the bulletin above contradicts this statement about tuition benefits and suggests that no distinction is made.
I don’t know which tuition exchanges Georgetown participates in, but know it (and BC) does not participate in the Jesuit schools exchange, or at least aren’t full participants.