My kiddo has a serious genetic condition for which a lot of outside scholarships are available. These are typically named scholarship to honor a young person with the disorder who died. Most of the scholarships are presumed to help the individual student have more time for treatment compliance – in other words – to reduce the work burden on the student. However, even under these conditions we ran into issues with colleges that met full need. He had an option between two full-need colleges – one said for any outside scholarship he could have half the money up to $1000 and then about a quarter of the money after that, with a cap of about $2000. The rest would reduce the needs-based package. The other college said up to $7000 they would not use any of the funds to reduce need – instead it would reduce summer work income expectations. Guess which college we chose?
The key thing here is we asked each college to calculate exactly what our FA package would look like if he obtained outside scholarship money (and we anticipated several levels of funds he might receive). The calculations they used were very complicated, and not fully consistent with the policies listed on the respective websites.