I have a four year academic scholarship. At the beginning of the year, I received my usually amount for the semester. I did not receive my state equalization grant mid semester, but I had paid the rest of my tuition already so I thought I would be elegi for a refund. Then I noticed my uni DEDUCTED my semester academic scholarship!! I freaked out. I talked to the financial aid person, she said they OVER BUDGETED this year so they used my state equalization grant to fund my scholarship. On my account it says two separate names for the funds so it doesn’t look like they used the state grant to fund my scholarship. So apparently I still received my full amount of scholarship and not the state grant. All the past semesters I received the teg and full amount of my scholarship.
I was wondering if my school was allowed to do this with the state equalization grant to fund my scholarship? Should they just take away the name of the state grant on my account and put my acadmeic scholarship back to full?
You need to look at the scholarship terms to see if they state that you can stack awards.
Since in the past you’ve received both, it doesn’t appear that they should have done what they did. You should fight this. You have a contract for a scholarship award. You also qualify for a state award. They need to give you your scholarship, per contract…and give you your state award.
Some schools will only allow a certain max amount of “free money,” but that’s not the case here.
TEG (Tuition Equalization Grant) Program States the following
Since TEG is only available to private schools and allows the school itself to determine your elegibility, theoretically your school has a right to do what ever it wants with its money. To me it appears that you should not have gotten TEG along with a full tuition scholarship, since you were only suppose to receive the amount of tuition that you were paying in excess of what you would pay at a public schools (since you got a full tuition scholarship, you were not paying anything). The school choose to use the free money to reduce their tuition payment (which is not unusual).
If op’s scholarship covers the cost of tuition, then Op should not expect anything from TEG. Even if it were not full tuition the max award is ~3400 unless Op has an efc under 1k. Then the max is $5k or what Op would have had to pay out of pocket up to the amount of tuition at Texas public.
From what I have seen, state aid can only be used for tuition. it is not unusual to use those monies first before applying other aid.
How much was your tuition? How much is your scholatship and how much is your TEG grant? Keep in mind that all monies over tuition fees and books is considered taxable income