While you have to report outside scholarships, they can’t quantify certain scholarships such as the flight scholarship. That didn’t count against my son at all. Depending on the school, they don’t necessarily count outside scholarships given directly to the student, at least in our experience they didn’t.
@ucbalumnus, yes, it’s based on unmet need, but eventually, you get to the EFC, which is what they use to determine need, and they won’t let you bring in anymore scholarship above that. So if our EFC was 7K, anything below that would go to the school, whereas, at Penn and MIT, that was totally not the case. I am not explaining it well, but believe me, we went through a discussion, not at UCSD but at Harvey Mudd in 2012, and because of our EFC that year and our qualifying for a Cal Grant, the outside scholarship would have gone right into their pocket. I also did some conversing with f. aid at UCSD/UCI in 2015, and it was definitely true that a portion of the scholarship would go to the school. I’ve got lots of f. aid offers (I save documents because it’s very helpful in my job as a consultant) to compare, and it’s clear that the schools outside California that aren’t dealing with federal aid in the f. aid package can formulate aid much differently than those that do deal with government aid (such as Pell and Cal Grants).