<p>I have 4 kids; currently 3 are in college (my youngest started in theater in September.) I think of financial aid at private schools as a sort of “tuition discount”, somewhat fungible; the line between financial aid and merit aid has seemed blurry to me in many cases. With 3 in college we finally qualified for FA, according to FAFSA, but my older Ds’ colleges did not adjust their FA (as they are not “full-need” institutions.) I did successfully appeal to receive a few more thousand from one of the older D’s colleges (it is one of the schools discussed on this forum, although that one is not in theater.) Still, with 3 in college, our “full need” is not met. For D4, the theater kid, merit aid was all over the place. Most schools did not give specifically delineated FA, but rather named scholarship funds, but it was fairly inconsistent-- a few did list what was clearly financial aid along with what was clearly delineated as merit. (Can you tell I made her apply to a lot of schools?)</p>
<p>The school she really wanted to attend most gave her the least aid initially: no FA, and only a smallish merit scholarship, less than half of what any other school offered. We were successful in getting them to revise it to an amount consistent with the largest award from another school (but that was a school that is considered by rankings to be more competitive.) </p>
<p>In my appeals to colleges I do include a narrative that points out that, although D1 has graduated, we continue to pay loans from her college years, during which she was the only one in college and we had not FA (she went to a no-merit school.) As you know, just because you are not paying tuition currently, that does not mean you are finished paying for college.</p>