<p>emilybee, It’s not hard to understand and I’m glad things worked out for your son; it’s just that you are using the term incorrectly and it’s actually more helpful to distinguish. You wrote, “Institutional aid is what it’s called at schools that are need based only. Institutional aid is based on an assessment by the school of a student’s financial need. It is not based on merit…” Actually, ‘institutional aid’ is just talking about who provides the funding (the college/university), not whether it’s merit or financial aid. That’s why most of us talk about need-based or merit-based aid. Also, if your student did best with need-based financial aid, conventional wisdom would have dictated to target those schools. That’s why I’m suggesting to this mom to figure out where she would do best. Unfortunately, in her case, even if her daughter would do better at a meet-full-need school, the need to acquire a ncp waiver means she needs to include schools that are less expensive (like Canadian or instate schools), where the student will likely get merit (like some of the suggestions here) or schools where the ncp form is not required.</p>