<p>I have seen some kids kids get one or more small non-recurring scholarships as they are heading off to school and wonder if those might end up hurting their chances of getting long term recurring aid. My thinking is that you might do best qualifying for as much aid as possible, given by the college, your freshman year, as it is more likely to be recurring aid, but if you’ve gotten a couple thousand in aid from outside sources, that is likely to just reduce what you can get from the school…perhaps reducing it for multiple years. </p>
<p>Could getting small, outside scholarships actually hurt you financially in the long run?</p>
<p>but aren’t some merit aid amounts affected somewhat by need? I understand they are based on merit, but I think I have read here on CC before something about merit aid being used by some schools to help fill need. The way I had read it was that perhaps a school couldn’t offer 100% need, but because a student had need, they might then offer merit aid to fill that gap.<br>
Even though merit aid is based on merit, there have to be times when many students would qualify for a finite pool of merit aid, so would the school then be more likely to give that merit aid to those who also have financial need?</p>
<p>Your OP was asking if outside scholarships would affect need based FA. Now it sounds like you’re asking about Institutional scholarships, but I’m not sure.</p>
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<p>I think what you’re referring to is that when a student receives an outside merit scholarship, they must report it to the school and if they are receiving FA, their package is likely to be reduced by that amount (although some schools reduce loans and WS before grants).</p>
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<p>Merit scholarships are almost always less abundant than the number of students applying for them. Merit scholarships vary in their relationship to financial need: need is not a factor taken into consideration; need is one of several factors taken into consideration; the student must have financial need to qualify for consideration. While they don’t always do so, colleges should clearly state which applies in their description of merit scholarships.</p>
<p>They could. A lot of schools do not meet full need. So when they put together a package around outside merit awards the first year, there is sometimes no way of telling what the package would have been without those scholarshiips. Now if the outside scholarships are all reported AFTER the aid package is offered, then some discussion as to how future awards will be configured can be made, and the student can take special care to have it indicated on his file that subsequent year awards should be based on the award given BEFORE the outside scholarships were applied. </p>
<p>Most schools, whether they meet full need or not, tend to give awards commensurate that those given the year before, if the need is the same, with some adjustment for making a student take some more responsibility for the costs. IT’s up in the air when a school that does not guarantee to meet need is faced with a situation in subsequent years where the need is increased. Many times, they will just throw in a token increase, or just ignore the new need. So it needs to be made v-e-r-y clear when outside scholarships are in the picture that they are a one year thing and some assurances for future aid should be documented or there could be issues later.</p>