Okay thanks so much. The merit vs. need based aid thing is kind of what I’m getting at (but clearly having difficulty articulating hahaha).
All of the schools he has been accepted to thus far are ~ 70k COA (full pay). We have an EFC on the FAFSA of ~40k (which I know we shouldn’t pay much attention to) and the NPCs (which we should pay attention to) are all coming back at around 35k.
We haven’t received a financial aid package from any of these schools. Just award letters with his acceptances, detailing merit awards ranging from 30-37k. So what I’m stuck on is – if his merit award covered the full 35k gap between our NPC result and the full COA, will whatever he makes in an outside scholarship come off of what we owe out of pocket? OR will they just take some of the merit back and our out of pocket number remains unchanged?
More succinctly – are merit and need-based aid the same thing?