My employer gives 50% tuition benefit, assume 35K/year. When I run NPC from multiple schools, we will get 10K-40K financial aid/ institutional scholarship/grants, depending on which schools. But almost all schools treat employer tuition benefit as part of the aid, which reduces the institutional scholarship/grants dollar by dollar.
Some school treat all outside scholarship/grants (employer tuition benefit included) in this way, i.e., cut into your need-based financial aid until they have replaced all self-help (loans, work-study, and expected student contribution). A handful of schools is more generous about outside scholarship, i.e., outside scholarships will not begin to cut into your need-based financial aid until they have replaced all self-help (loans, work-study, and expected student contribution) and the entirety of your family contribution. But these schools treat employer tuition benefit differently from outside scholarships, and it will be used to reduce school aid dollar by dollar (Wash U, U Chicago, Colgate, Bowdoin, etc).
In the end, it seems the employer tuition benefit is going to benefit the enrolled schools, not the parent.
Is there school that may treat employer tuition benefit to reduce family contribution?
Or is there any way to utilize employer tuition benefits to reduce family contribution? Otherwise, employer tuition benefits are not very helpful. We can only take the bigger amount between employer tuition benefits and institutional scholarship.
I have the same question. And I wonder if semantics matter - whether the tuition benefit is called a benefit or a scholarship. We are starting to have conversations with Financial Aid offices and hoping to get more information soon
If you are talking about how institutional need-based aid is impacted, it doesnât matter what outside dollars are called- benefits, scholarships, grants, whatever. Every dollar the student has available from an outside source is one dollar less in NEED that the student has to be augmented by institutional need-based aid. Institutional need-based aid is not an infinite resource. When a studentâs need is calculated by the school, any dollar that comes from an outside source (like an employer tuition benefit) means that an institutional dollar can be redirected to a different student (or retained in the schoolâs need-based pot to be allocated to the general pool of assisted students).
This is sort of true (probably mostly true). At some extremely wealthy schools, like Princeton, they first apply outside scholarships to student savings contribution, then student term-time work contribution, etc.
We realized before our eldest was a junior in high school that our university employerâs tuition benefit reduced our financial need and, in fact, made us full-pay despite woefully less than full-pay resources. Fortunately, we realized it with enough time to pivot, and focused on lower cost public flagships for first kid who wanted big and D3 merit awards for second kid who wanted small.
So no, we never found any schools where our tuition benefit didnât reduce need-based aid dollar for dollar, though maybe someone else knows of any.
I want to caution that an employer tuition benefit is for tuition only. You wonât receive half the cost of attendance, but rather half the tuition.
An employer tuition benefit is financial assistance from the employer, so it makes sense that it is counted in the same manner as an outside scholarship. Need based financial aid is by definition based on need, and any financial assistance for college costs that the student receives from sources other than their own family reduces the studentâs need & therefore the financial aid âneededâ by the student.
Of course, parents typically seem to need more than schools feel we need, but at least everyone is treated equally.
According to a friend, Skidmore will be letting them use their tuition benefits as their EFC. I wish my daughter had applied there and done it ED. If I had known, I would have encouraged it.
Iâm pretty sure my daughterâs school, Florida Tech, would have awarded the âregularâ merit award (based on class rank, gpa, test scores), and any other grants or awards, and happily taken the 1/2 tuition from the employer. The only real rule it seemed to have was that no school funds (merit, grants, need based aid) would be paid OUT from the school, either to the student or to an outside vendor (rent, insurance premiums, travel, for an internship)
My daughter had a bunch of scholarships and grants that they stacked and applied in a particular order. Example, she had a Florida bright futures scholarship which the school restricted to tuition only (as allowed by BF rules), so they applied that to tuition first, then applied school merit, then applied her athletic scholarship to a meal plan.
When she moved off campus they would not give her money to pay her rent (but she would have had funds to live in a dorm). There was another grant she had that was also limited to tuition but I donât remember what it was.
There may also be another school like DU that gives part of its merit award for room and board for 2 years (wanting all students to live in the dorms for 2 years) and that would leave plenty (plenty!) of tuition to be paid by the employer grant. DU also charges the same tuition as on campus to its study abroad programs for junior year, so that would be easy for the employer to pay 1/2 as tuition.
Would you get other need based aid? I donât know. My daughter did not get need based aid from her school (at the time, NCAA restriction on it because of her athletic aid), but the school made it work in other ways. She did get federal and state need based aid so she would have qualified for school need based aid if not for the athletic aid. I know they would have been thrilled to have 1/2 the tuition funded by an outside source.
Actually, it does seem to be common for another method: outside scholarships first replace self-help, then replace the schoolâs FA grants before replacing parent contribution. But what employer tuition benefit counts as may vary by school.
It is even worse. So be careful what you do. Goal should be merit scholarship, and not FA. That canât be taken. For public schools if you do not have âneedâ they do not care about outside scholarships. Here is another obstacle. Some employers do not pay to school. They pay as addition to salary. So it is taxed left and right. So you do not get even half of the tuition. Plus some again do not cover any fees (medical, technical, campus busses etc. - some schools are very creative charging a lot of fees that are not tuition. ) So say you have 45k âtuitionâ in a year and 15k room and board. What can you expect? 45/2? No way. 5k fees. Half tuition pretax 20k. If you will get 15k to pay towards tuition (after all taxes), you are lucky.
We only went all the way down the rabbit hole for the school my daughter committed to, which is MIT. There, our employer benefit (Rice will pay ten percent of its own tuition amount toward any accredited university) counts as the studentâs contribution. So, ordinarily, MITâs aid package includes $5400 that the student contributes via work study or summer work, etc. But my daughter can use the benefit in place of her contribution. So it does save her the time of working a campus job. To us, this is a real benefit because we do not want her to take on too much in her first year. Additionally, because the Rice benefit is a little over the expected 5400 student contribution, she can use extra toward a laptop. That is a provision that is only allowed in the first year.
Not really. Merit is given for all 4 years (unless some strange scholarships like for 2 years that UMD started). It is guaranteed with GPA required. Financial Aid depends of income and is revised every year. So it is absolutely not guaranteed. Some schools greatly reduce FA depending on family situation (one of older kids graduated and suddenly younger one became full pay, read some horror stories ) or we are sorry letters from school (due to unpredictable economy) school can offer this year only x amount of money. Go find loanâŠ
Do you still feel they are the same?
Actually our decision was exactly based on Merit vs FA at many schools. (Dd applied to 20 and was accepted to 18 and WL at 1.) We chose school that gave us in writing that DD award will stay the same for all 4 years. Why? Because system was changing. We had 3 kids simultaneously in college (different years but they were close in age). We could pay 25k per kid with old FAFSA, but no way 75k per kid with a new ridiculous one⊠(Show me middle class family that can drop 75Ă3 a year simultaneously!)
Yes. Generally speaking, âFinancial Aidâ is money provided from a source outside the studentâs family that offsets education expenses. This is a pretty broad definition that includes merit aid, need-based aid and student loans. Where you are mistaken is in assuming that âFinancial Aidâ only includes need-based aid.
Itâs important to have the terminology correct. Even if you donât agree that loans, or work study, or merit aid or whatever are financial aid, the higher ed industry considers all of these things as financial aid.
âMerit vs need based financial aidâ would be a more appropriate way to discuss the two. Merit is typically (not always) independent of financial need. However, need based financial aid can and very often is impacted by merit ⊠as merit increases, need decreases so added scholarships (outside or perhaps departmental) can result in decreased need based financial aid. Itâs all part of the financial aid umbrella. Some may disagree, but it is what it is: financial aid includes merit based aid and need based aid.
. Not to offend you, but students are always taught not to use Wikipedia as a source in any papers.