Due to a medical malpractice settlement that happened when i was a child, i get 30,000 US dollars put towards my tuition each year for the first four years of college. Does anyone know how this will affect the amount of financial aid I’ll receive? I live in a middle/upper middle class home, so my household income is right on the edge of a place like Princeton covering all my tuition.
If you receive $30,000 per year for tuition, you have $30,000 a year for tuition. That is how schools will look at it.
If it was a FAFSA only school, it would not affect aid freshman year, assuming it is not paid to you (but rather, paid to the school). You would have to include it as money received the following year, and it would have a big affect on your aid. How a Profile school might collect this information in advance, I am not sure - but they might have questions that would require you to reveal the settlement. In any case, your aid sophomore year & beyond would absolutely be affected.
Your best bet is to be honest with school aid offices & find out how your aid is affected at each school you are interested in attending.
When you tour colleges, schedule a visit with the head of financial aid so that you can discuss this special situation. You will not be the first studetns they have met who had a fixed outside scholarship, inheritance, or legal settlement. They can tell you how this will affect your total aid package.