In general, I would assume merit isn’t tied to need.
If it is, it’s not merit.
Schools have university funds (your regular merit) but then additional scholarships that might be endowed. I don’t think there is issue with filing a CSS if you want to. We didn’t qualify for anything but I still filed just in case. The time a CSS would impact is if someone had severe need and a school was need aware and wouldn’t want to provide a large grant. But that doesn’t sound like you. And if it was, you’d need to file anyway to afford that school.
I’d never know if American gave us just $15K because they saw me as someone who can afford that - but I highly doubt it - because with such a lower offer, they lost a potential customer.
Here’s an example of merit vs. needing aid or other requirements - UNH
They have regular university merit but then have the Hamel Scholarship which is endowed and required for a New Hampshire student.
Then they have this one - The David Ellsworth Davis New Hampshire Scholarship Fund recognizes a student whose families have resided in New Hampshire for at least three generations.
Then you have one like this - Angelica Rose Basso and Vincent Luti scholarship - which clearly has a need component: Undergraduate students who are studying a major in the College of Liberal Arts or the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture are eligible for this scholarship. Recipients are selected by Financial Aid.
Merit scholarships can be focused on several different things. We typically think of academic strength, leadership, etc as typical types, but there are also scholarships for other forms of top performing achievement/talent/interests- community service scholarships, some for the arts, some for certain demographics, etc. A family member of ours endowed a journalism scholarship at a highly regarded state university, so obviously that scholarship is targeted for a student majoring in journalism.
In some (several) cases a scholarship might say that priority is given to a student with financial need. IMO if you don’t complete the FAFSA or profile the school may then assume (probably rightly so) that you have no financial need. So it’s unlikely you are gaining anything by not submitting them.
And as has been mentioned, if some catastrophe befalls the family (heaven forbid) during your child’s years in college, schools can say they cannot assist you financially if they have no FAFSA/ profile form on file for you.
Yes, but if such a student gets a full ride (or a combination of scholarships adding up to a full ride) before sending in the FAFSA, they might not bother with the FAFSA unless the college requires them to file it. See under “Freshman Scholarships” at Scholarships | Tuskegee University to see a college’s reason for requiring FAFSA in such situations.
On some college websites, specific scholarships are listed. And if there is a need component, it usually states that under what is required for the scholarship.
Another way to know…if a scholarship requires submission of financial information, it likely has a need based component. For example, both of our kids applied for local outside scholarships that they did not receive because we had no financial need. Actually for some, kids didnt even apply because the scholarship committees required financial information.
Both my kids went to schools that required a FAFSA be filed if you wanted aid from the school, including merit aid. It didn’t mean you wouldn’t get a merit award if you had no need, but overall they were trying to make sure that those with need received some aid and they moving a lot of pieces around.
At U of Wyoming, a lot of the merit aid and grants are given by alums and are ‘named’ scholarships. Some are awarded by the departments (‘for a teacher’ ‘for a nursing student’) but they are all run through the FA department so the FA department might give a second award to someone who has more need. I liked this system as each student had to write a thank you letter to the alum/alum family thanking them for the money and stating what they were studying and how they’d use the money. I think it reinforced that this money was from an actual person or family who may be interested in them. The Cheney family (RIP Dick) funded a lot of scholarships, including one to every student who was in study abroad that semester so they got a lot of thank you notes. Not every student who studied abroad had financial need, but if they wanted a grant they had to fill out the FAFSA.
A few schools give out a grants JUST for filling out the FAFSA. Again, if you don’t want the award, don’t fill out the FAFSA.
I guess an exception would be if the student wasn’t a citizen or otherwise eligible to fill out the FAFSA, the school would have to decide if they’d require it or grant an exception. On the other hand, some scholarships are only available to citizens and some schools use the FAFSA as a way to prove eligibility.
I think it’s common for endowed scholarships. Charleston was like that.
Wyoming seems an outlier if I’m reading right at @twoinanddone .
They don’t seem to have school funds dedicated to scholarships like other schools. Rather it all appears to be endowed.
As they say about the Brown and Gold Commitment - “is offered as a placeholder and will be funded annually with individual scholarships that are made possible through the generosity of UW Foundation donors and/or other institutional aid.”
My daughter went to Wyo starting in 2014, and the scholarships were a little different. They still had WUE as a separate scholarship but had a non-resident scholarship, and those were both rolled into the Brown and Gold. I don’t know how they fund them now. There was never a problem when my daughter got hers. Wyoming has a lot of oil money to give out. Very few instate students pay anything for tuition because of their funding (and low tuition to start with).
There are a lot of scholarships provided by the state for instate students. They have something called the License plate scholarships and I think every instate student gets one of those. Most scholarships out of state students get are the alum scholarships or department scholarships (lots of those too) but once the department awards the scholarship it goes through the FA office. They of course also have Pell grants and SEOG grants that OOS students can qualify for and SEOG is awarded to OOS too. The alums donating the scholarships (and they aren’t huge, usually $2000 or $5000) they can restrict any way they want, like instate only, out of state only, school of education only. The engineering school has LOTS of extra money and I think every engineer gets about $3000 per year just for being an engineer.
But you have to file a FAFSA because it all goes thru FA department. I did what they told me because I wanted the money.
But some scholarships are only open to citizens. Daughter’s school had a number of these because they were govt/NASA related. They can do that by SSN and sometimes the school notifies the student that the SSN is listed as non-citizen and they make the student show up with a passport or other proof of citizenship or green card to get their student loans or scholarships. There used to be more posts about this early in the acceptance cycles but I haven’t seen them as often in recent years.