<p>Here is my question: Do colleges calculate your need-based aid before or after adding in your merit aid?</p>
<p>My situation:</p>
<p>I got into Tulane Honors, with a scholarship for 22,000 a year. Tulane is 54,000 a year. Do they calculate my need based on the 54k number, or 54-22, so 32k?</p>
<p>Does this vary from school to school, and between public and private schools?</p>
<p>Thanks in advance for your help.</p>
<p>Tulane will take the cost of attendance minus your institutional EFC to determine your need. The 22K will be looked at as reducing your need. Tulane does not claim to meet full need. They claim to meet an average of 94-96% of need with grants, loans and workstudy.</p>
<p>DO you know your FAFSA EFC?? If your parents own a home, add about 5% of the home equity they have in the home to your federal EFC and you will have a fair idea of how Tulane will calculate your institutional EFC.</p>
<p>my fafsa efc is 42k</p>
<p>so, with the merit aid, my need is zero, but without it, it is 12k. My question is, will I get need aid. If I read your reply correctly, I won’t?</p>
<p>That is correct, with your merit aid you don’t have any need.</p>
<p>Many colleges do this. (Most?) If you’re receiving merit aid it does relieve some of your need. You’re smart to ask, as many students end up being surprised by this when they get their FA awards. It’s not hard to understand why a student would see merit aid as a “bonus” in a way, but unfortunately many colleges don’t look at it that way. It makes sense that it would reduce need, but when very often your real need would not be fully covered by “need-based” aid, then you’d want to see that merit aid filling in the gap. Alas, often this is not the case.</p>
<p>*my fafsa efc is 42k
*</p>
<p>So, if the cost of Tulane is about $50k, and you’ve been awarded a $22k per year scholarship, then the remaining amount…about $28k per year…is a lot less than your EFC. So, you’ve reduced your EFC by a lot. </p>
<p>And, if you take out a student loan of $5500, then your parents will only have to pay about $23k per year. That is a LOT less than their EFC.</p>
<p>Have your parents said how much they’ll pay each year?</p>
<p>Thanks for your help everyone</p>
<p>My parents can pay maximum, 25k. We have no idea where the 42k number came from, there is no way we could ever afford it. My dad estimates, that if we cut back all eating out, any vacations, buying new clothes, etc, we could reach 35, (but obviously i’m not going to make my family do that.)</p>
<p>It seems stupid to reduce need based aid when someone is given merit aid, because now its like I only got a 9k award.</p>
<p>Also, my dad will not let me borrow money to go to a school ranked below UVA and William and Mary, as they are both instate and affordable. Furthermore, I got into JMU Honors, with a scholarship, so it would cost around 11k a year. So, it means that Tulane is basically out of the question.</p>
<p>*It seems stupid to reduce need based aid when someone is given merit aid, because now its like I only got a 9k award.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Not really. You misunderstand financial aid. </p>
<p>COA 54k
EFC 42k
need 12k</p>
<p>**If you hadn’t gotten that merit scholarship, you would NOT have been given $12k in “free money”. ** Instead, you would have been given a $5500 student loan and either been gapped the rest or maybe given a couple thousand in work study and gapped for the balance. So, in other words, you and your family would have been paying all or nearly all of your costs thru direct payment of EFC and gap, loans, and maybe work study. </p>
<p>Your thinking would be right if your “need” would have been filled with a grant. However, it would not have been filled with a grant. </p>
<p>So, instead of paying nearly all of your costs, with this scholarship you and your family now can pay a LOT less. :)</p>
<p>Seriously, if your parents put in $25k and your scholarship is $22k, then that is $47k right there. If you take out a student loan of $5500, and work over the summer, you could cover the rest. </p>
<p>tuition and fees: $41,888
Room and board: $9,824
Books and supplies: $1,200 </p>
<p>Plus personal expenses.</p>
<p>ok, I re-read the italicized part, it seems overly-petulant, so let me rephrase:</p>
<p>It seems counter-intuitive that if Tulane is trying to lure me to go to Tulane, they would use merit and need based aid to cover the same gap. Merit-aid, if it is truly a lure, should be a bonus, not instead of need aid. But otherwise, I take your point. So thank you, for your advice.</p>
<p>My good friend’s son was awarded a 15,000 merit based award (National Merit/Hispanic) to a private college. His need was then reduced by that amount and the college met the 90% of his remaining need as they do for most students. </p>
<p>He was also accepted to a school that meets full need, but only awards need-based aid – no merit. After you boiled it all down, he got a better deal at the school that did not award merit, but did meet need. And I agree with you, Packer, that the enticement of the merit-based award was sort of a phantom lure.</p>
<p>He ended up going to the need-based aid only school, which was a much higher ranked school to begin with. It was too bad, though, because he had been really interested in the first college and probably would have gone there all things being equal.</p>
<p>Actually good-sized merit aid is good for those who have high EFCs who can’t or don’t want to pay their EFCs. It’s one of the few ways to reduce EFC.</p>
<p>You did get a bonus…your EFC was reduced. Keep in mind that Tulane awards those exact merit amounts based on stats…not on your EFC. If your EFC had been 60k, your merit would have been the same. </p>
<p>I imagine that you must have very good stats. Another school might have awarded you full tuition, and then your parents contribution would have only been room, board and books…probably less than $15k. But, again, that award amount would have been same regardless of whether your EFC was 15k, 25, or 35k. It’s based on stats.</p>
<p>It’s true that it doesn’t help those with lower EFCs who would get lots of aid anyway at “full need” schools.</p>
<p>It depends. The kid I was talking about did not have a low EFC – one of his parents has a well-paying professional job. He did have some need, however, and it worked out better for him at the meets-full-need/need-based aid only college.</p>
<p>But, yeah, it does vary according to different circumstances for students and families.</p>
<p>For MANY students, merit awards are extremely helpful. So many students would get nothing but loans and perhaps work study without the merit awards. They are not misleading … they are awarded without regard to financial need, therefore the committee that awards the scholarship is not looking to see whether or not the student will receive any other assistance.</p>
<p>I do realize that many students do not understand how need based aid works, but a merit award does reduce need. If you think about it logically, that makes sense.</p>
<p>I could be wrong, but it seems to me that most schools that give a good amount of merit based aid don’t meet need. </p>
<p>So, for many of these schools the merit scholarship a student receives may be the only “free money” the student would have received.</p>
<p>M2CK is right of course. The OP has the mistaken but very common misunderstanding of what EFC and merit aid really mean. Think of it this way. EFC is a “fixed” amount, you are expected to pay it because presumably you can afford it. If you apply to Tulane and you don’t get any merit money, and your EFC is $42K, then you are expected to pay $42K, and Tulane will cover the rest, or perhaps 95% of the rest. That varies a bit too, but let’s just say for the sake of your question they cover the rest. Now you got $22,000 in merit aid. If your family could (presumably) afford $42K, then why shouldn’t Tulane expect you to pay the remainder of the cost, $32K? Not only is your family saving $10,000 in cash, but it is $12,000 in loans you don’t have to take out, and that’s annually. That of course assumes the EFC is correct and that they gave you no further grants or work-study.</p>
<p>Another way to look at it, and maybe the simpler way, is that you have a certain asset base to pay for college. Now Tulane just added to your asset base by $22,000 but only if you go to Tulane. They essentially lowered the “sticker price”. If you have $42,000 to pay for a car, and the car has a sticker price of $54,000 but they discount it to $32,000 you don’t expect them to additionally take off the $14,000 you couldn’t have paid in the first place without a loan, do you?</p>
<p>Now if your parents think the EFC is off, they should go over it with the FA office at Tulane. Perhaps your EFC is actually lower. Maybe he made a mistake. It would be foolish to not completely check it out for such a big decision. What do you have to lose?</p>
<p>I hope that clears it up for you. It isn’t only Tulane that does it this way, they all do. Also, regarding the discussion about high EFC/low EFC and all that, it is true what has been said but there is one advantage to merit as opposed to FA regardless of the EFC situation, and that is that merit aid is guaranteed at that amount for 4 years (assuming you make the grades to keep it and all that) while FA can change with your financial circumstances and other factors.</p>
<p>
Sorry bad math late at night. I should have said “If you have $42,000 to pay for a car, and the car has a sticker price of $54,000 but they discount it to $32,000 you don’t expect them to additionally take off the $12,000 you couldn’t have paid in the first place without a loan, do you?” Same point of course.</p>
<p>What I think is significant is that when you apply to schools that either don’t meet need and/or do put loans in FA packages, then when you do have a very high EFC ( small amount of “need”) then the school doesn’t “cover the rest” with grants. </p>
<p>the mistake is that people who have a small amount of need think that that need is going to be covered with free money. That only happens at schools who don’t put any loans in FA packages. </p>
<p>The school is going to “cover the rest” with a student loan and work-study and maybe a gap. In other words, when all is “said and done”, the student and family will have paid for ALL costs. </p>
<p>So, in such cases, a good merit scholarship is a real deduction of what the family/student would have to pay.</p>