<p>So D and I were tooling around Philadelphia, looking at some potential colleges (NOT UPENN), and D was apparently texting with one of her cousins (rising Junior). C mentioned that she was interested in UPenn, or possibly Columbia. Now C's family is very well off, and it's hard to imagine them qualifying for aid, despite the fact that they will overlap 2 in college for a couple of years. </p>
<p>Anyway, D suggested that UPenn and Columbia are expensive, to which C responded (rather smugly?) that she expects to get scholarships (Who knew? ;)). It's my understanding that neither of these schools gives undergraduate merit scholarships. Is there some secret scholarship award(s) that we don't know about?</p>
<p>Nope. But there are plenty of kids who think they will get scholarships and there are plenty of parents walking around talking about their kids getting full scholarships when they really got FA.</p>
<p>Having said that, Harvard has scholarships for kids with our last name. So perhaps something exists that applies to three kids per year.</p>
<p>In my son’s high school grad program there was a list of the college scholarships being awarded. There was no labeling differentiation between merit scholarships and FA and they were all categorized as scholarships.</p>
<p>Is it possible that your niece has applied for outside scholarships? My Ds received 5K from an outside, private company that his grandmother had some connection with. There are always a few odd scholarships around, although they don’t make much of a dent in a 50K undergrad bill. I can imagine if you cobbled together a few of these ( NMS, private company, maybe Scouting or activity award you could get to 10K or so, but it would take a lot of luck and could certainly not be counted on before the money was awarded.)
It’s more likely that your sibling’s family just doesn’t get it.</p>
<p>MD Mom is correct. It is also possible that moonchild is correct as the neice/cousin could mean outside scholarships . . . that said, she’s getting ahead of herself that A. she’ll get into either school and B. she’ll qualify for any scholarships that will put a dent in their yearly costs. </p>
<p>The word scholarship is not limited to a merit based award. Yale’s financial aid is identified as a scholarship and most Ivie’s have a high income ceiling for aid (i.e. income up to 200K) so she may be accurate in expecting scholarships although it would be based on financial need.</p>
<p>I agree that Ivies only give financial aid but my dd’s high school has an alumni that gives a scholarship ($15K/yr) to any kid that goes Ivy!!! Very generous! So you never know - but I agree that the kid is probably clueless!</p>
<p>This may depend on how you define “very well off”. Yale would give need based financial aid to a typical family with two in private college with an income of less than $275K per year. Without prior savings and perhaps other borrowing, it would be quite a challenge to pay the full $115K after taxes for two kids on $280K in income.</p>
<p>It can’t be said enough, run the on-line estimators for financial aid at each college you are considering before you spend time applying. Many have unrealistic expectations for either too much or too little financial aid. An admission that your family feels they cannot afford is no better than a rejection.</p>
<p>Many of the Ivies list thier institutional need based aid as scholarships on their award letter. A student can receive a scholarship from either the general scholarship fund or a named/endowed scholarship.</p>
<p>So the student who says that they received a scholarship from an Ivy is not exactly lying, because they did indeed receive a “scholarship” that was tied to having a financial need.</p>
<p>The Ivies will also give preferential packaging to students that they are trying to attract who align with the institutional mission. The ivies will do a finanical reveiw using a package from a peer school. So if a student gets accepted at Harvard, but feels that Dartmouth or Brown is a better fit, and the money is going to be a bit of a stretch, the student can request a finanical review using the award letter from HYPMSAWS(similar peer school) and the package 9/10 times will be adjusted.</p>
<p>I cannot speak for UPenn/Columbia specifically, but here is the way it works at Princeton.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>First, very well off is a relative term even if you limit the definition to financially (vs. spiritually, morally, etc.). Use the Financial Aid calculator on the schools website. I found it to be very accurate, i.e. no big surprises in what your FA award will be (assuming that you enter the information accurately). Somewhere in the neighborhood of $200K/year is where the FA disappears and is a sliding scale up to that point (with one kid in college).</p></li>
<li><p>There are no merit based scholarships.</p></li>
<li><p>There may be some very specialized interest, geography, etc. based scholarships available, e.g. Inuit 9-toed Amish EE and Dance Majors of Greenland Norse decent. (That darn Nanook Odin Ericsson, III from Lancaster, PA beat us out again, just because he invented the gas TV. Big deal. Its just not fair. If he takes his custom pointe shoes off, he can still only count to 19, but Im not bitter at all. No, not me. Im happy for him. Happy, I tell you!). Sorry, as you can see, we have touched a nerve. ;)</p></li>
<li><p>Scholarships from the college come in the form of need-based Financial Aid (for which I am eternally grateful, but I digress again ).</p></li>
<li><p>As MD Mom and ahsmuoh mentioned, you may obtain external scholarships, e.g. your local hunt clubs Animal Preservation through Taxidermy Fund. Beware of feeling too good about these though! Because your FA is need-based, it will be reduced by the amount of external scholarship money that you receive. For example, if your FA award is initially $10000 and then an external scholarship is received for $3000, your FA award will be reduced to $7000. The point here is that external scholarships really do not help your financial situation (except in the first year where you get to keep some of the $ to buy a laptop for your kid). In fact, it is possible to actually hurt your financial situation by receiving external scholarships if you were to receive more in external $ than your FA award. At that point, you become full-pay and all of the perks (e.g. not having to pay for some amenities because you receive FA) go away. It is best to receive at least $1 of FA unless you can truly afford to be full-pay.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Now back to your meaningful discussion of this topic…</p>
<p>S received a named scholarship from Dartmouth, after declaring his major. It was a scholarship for a student with his major, endowed in memory of a person. Of course, this scholarship was managed by the FA people, and he was already getting need-based aid. The award seemed to have a “merit” component, but I doubt it would have gone to someone who did not have need.</p>
<p>He also got a local scholarship. But local scholarships, while very generous and very welcome, typically do not carve more than a thousand or two off of a $55K price tag. It is far-fetched to assume that one is going to win one of the big ones, like Pepsi. </p>
<p>The OP’s niece’s remark about scholarships may reflect a sophisticated understanding of FA at Ivies, but most likely she is simply deluded, given her word choice.</p>
<p>Must be related to the family I was talking to a few months back, their DD has already been verbally offered a 1/2 athletic scholarship, 1/2 merit scholarship to Harvard. The child in question was a sophomore at the time, hadn’t taken SAT/ACT yet and hadn’t been on campus to visit. I asked the mom how they accomplished that and she asked me why–I clued her in :D.</p>
<p>Many kids (and parents) just assume that if they have strong stats that they’ll get a merit scholarship to a top school.</p>
<p>A year ago, we went to dinner with a family with a high school senior who was applying to elite (non merit) schools. Not only did they not believe that those schools would not give their D merit scholarships, they didn’t believe that she might not even get accepted (Her test scores were “good”, but not tippy top.)</p>
<p>In the end, she wasn’t accepted to any of them. They probably still believe that if she had gotten accepted then she would have gotten a merit scholarship. </p>
<p>The truth is that many haven’t really thought about the fact that tippy top schools are completely filled with students with great stats, so they don’t need to give merit…cuz who wouldn’t deserve the award?</p>
<p>People do not differentiate between merit and FA. A colleague of mine and I have talked extensively about our kids. She has four and I have two. Each of us has one tippy top student. She told me about her son getting offered scholarship money at Cornell years ago and the family going back to Cornell with another school’s offer and asking Cornell for more money. She is a smart woman. I never doubted that she knew what she was talking about. It was financial aid. But that is how the myth is perpetuated.</p>
<p>At the Ivies, it’s all need-based. If there’s a fund earmarked for, say, last name (my college roomie had one of those H names, btw,) or the top X major, then it still only goes to kids with need and only up to the max of their need. Many of these sit idle, every year. (Some of the old endowments are pretty limiting.)
So, if you have 10k of need and, say, get that endowed “scholarship” for 7500, it’s just an accounting swap. If the grant could allow up to 12k, you would still only get a max of 10k, from all U sources. But, enjoy it! </p>
<p>Technically, it’s part of the agreement among Ivies that all aid is based on need. Ime, they do not negotiate, except for what falls under the def of special circumstances. Also, some schools will let freshmen have their outside awards and not delete them from the school’s award- or will use them to reduce needed student loans.</p>
<p>lookingforward-I don’t know if they still do it but Harvard was converting federal loan aid into grant so kids graduated debt free along with generous financial aid to attend. The average student loan debt for a Harvard grad was $7000 a couple years ago.</p>
).</p></li>