It appears that the UTD NMF offer is about equal to UTD’s full COA (maybe just a bit less?). I couldn’t find the information online for UTD’s NMF scholarship stacking, but I did see that for UTD AES packages they get reduced if the addition of 3rd party scholarships pushes the total to greater than COA. I assume the same is probably true for UTD’s NMF package?
The real question I’m after is that for students that are hoping/likely to get the UTD NMF scholarship, does it make any sense to pursue trying to get 3rd party scholarships? Or is there really no point because you’ll hit the COA cap and have the UTD NMF reduced? There are a few smaller 3rd party scholarships my kid has a good chance at getting, but if there isn’t much point in applying (writing essays, getting strong letters of recommendation written, etc.) then he’d obviously prefer not to bother.
The UTD NMF scholarship is close to a full ride, especially if you stay on campus for housing. They do pay all tuition and fees plus give you $8000/yr stipend and if you stay on campus an additional $3000/yr for housing. That gives you $1222/mo (9 months) for everything else. My DD is spending $650/mo for a 4/2 campus apartment (that is the cheapest apartment) but it leaves alot of money for food. She does have a small additional scholarship that pays for books and art supplies. She does have a tax liability because of the room and board scholarship. The amount of that tax liability is depended upon the parents income, so it will vary by student.
As far as outside scholarships, before you do the work, make sure they can be spent on items beyond tuition, fees and books. Many are restricted to those items and UTD’s scholarship covers everything but books. Books can run $100 to $200 a semester or much more. My DD tends to rent the textbooks and that keeps the cost down.
Go ahead and apply but read the fine print, if it’s for “tuition only” not worth it, if it can be used for other college costs they will refund the money to your kid so it can be used on travel, computer whatever. Be aware that any scholarship money not used on tuition, books and certain fees will be considered taxable income (taxed at some point at the estate rate!) still wrapping my head around how the new tax law will work with scholarships starting this year.
Another issue is if the scholarship committee knows your kid is national merit and will be going to UTD, they might give it to another kid with greater need. I know this happen to my son with a small scholarship from our high school. Also keep in mind the the “official COA” includes $600 for books, $740 for transport and $1020 for personal spending per semester, so the official COA is more than tuition, books, and room and board that’s what we’ve found (+/- $100) semester what National Merit covers at UTD.
My child’s bill for the semester is $168. So yes it is basically a full ride. That does not include books. She chose not to explore outside scholarships once this was the decided school. But you could if they will cover books, everything else is covered. We decided given tax implications already to not worry about fine print in other scholarships and celebrate the AMAZING scholarship it is at an awesome school!
Thanks for all the info everyone. It will be interesting to see if Florida’s Benaquisto scholarship opening up to out-of-state students will impact now many NMF’s other colleges (like UTD) get.