How Are Scholarships Calculated into Financial Aid?

[ucbalumnus]

@NicoleGreen

Some schools stack scholarships, meaning your financial, merit, and outside scholarships all add together. Others schools don’t and essentially your scholarships end up canceling each other out. Finding schools that stacked was one of our main criteria when we were looking for schools to apply to.

An apparently common case is limited stacking, where merit or outside scholarships can stack with FA grants up to the amount of unmet need, student loans, and student work that would otherwise be in the FA package (see the Stanford and UCSD examples in reply #3).