Chance Me? Also Financial Aid Help?

aquapt
Wed, 26 Apr 2017 16:04:36 +0000

@akabrowny , you’re definitely in range to get into Scripps, give or take all of the randomness and subjectivity of the process. But, like most colleges, Scripps does not “stack” merit and need-based aid. Which is to say, if your EFC is $16K/year, and you were to receive a $16K merit award, it would not cover your out-of-pocket costs - rather, your financial aid would be reduced by the same amount and your out-of-pocket would stay the same. It is relatively rare that colleges will stack FA+merit such that the student ends up with a full ride scholarship.

Also, colleges differ in terms of how they allocate merit aid. To give two contrasting examples… two of my D’s schools this year were Scripps and Northeastern. (Oddly dissimilar, I know. Long story.) When I dug into the stats at collegedata.com, I discovered that Northeastern gives noticeably more merit aid to FA recipients than to students who would otherwise be full pay. This is a somewhat disingenuous approach, IMHO, because unless the merit award exceeds the need-based award, giving a merit “scholarship” to a student on FA costs the college nothing and does nothing for the student’s bottom line. If merit awards were “need blind,” I could understand that; but the fact that they are skewed toward financial aid recipients suggests to me that they’re using a financial mirage as a recruiting tool. 47% of FA recipients get merit awards at Northeastern, vs. only 23.6% of students without documented financial need.

Scripps’ merit scholarships are skewed the other way. Only 3.4% of FA recipients get merit awards, vs. 21.3% of non-FA recipients. So, Scripps’ philosophy is to put merit aid where it will actually change the student’s bottom line, not to roll merit awards into financial aid packages to flatter, but not further assist, the applicant.
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=770

So, I think Scripps’ approach is more above-board… but it means that as a financial aid applicant, your odds of a merit award aren’t great, and your odds that a merit award would reduce your out-of-pocket are near-zero. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but forewarned is forearmed. If your EFC is $16K and you need to get significantly below that, then you may need to look at some of the colleges that offer merit-based full-ride scholarships… or at least at no-loan schools where your FA award would be debt-free, leaving you enough borrowing capacity to finance the remainder. (At Scripps, 86% of FA packages include loans, averaging around $5K/year. To continue the comparison, 89% of NU FA packages include loans, averaging $6K… and when merit awards are part of the package, they do not even necessarily reduce the loan amount first before reducing grant aid. That’s where they really lose me - a merit award should at least reduce a student’s debt, if not their up-front costs!)

Hopefully this over-long post shows you what a good resource the collegedata site is, in comparing financials between schools. Sorry - I know it isn’t what you were hoping to hear - but I hope the info helps.