<p>Cost of rolling admissions Private College is $40K. EFC is $3K. Student gets $11K merit scholarship upon admission. Later when FA package comes, student receives loans, Pell, etc, and a $7K need based grant (still a gap, although typical).</p>
<p>How much did the merit aid actually help? If the student gets another $7K in free money, is the student likely to have gotten $18K need based aid if they had fallen below the threshold for the merit scholarship? Would you expect the need based aid to be less than $18K? If so, a lot?</p>
<p>I guess I am wondering at regular old Private College if the merit aid really makes a difference at all, or if since it is usually tied to more stringent requirements than need based aid, it is actually a “worse” deal. </p>
<p>I know a lot will depend on the school, but let’s just say it’s not a top 50 school. Say privates from 50 up or 75 up.</p>
<p>I think for most privates it doesn’t matter whether they call it merit or need based. Their enrollment managers estimate what it will take to enroll a student. If they don’t meet need and the don’t have automatic stats based merit aid, does it really matter?</p>
<p>Our experience with Privates that offered merit scholarships, where the need was larger than the scholarship, was that they decreased the need-based grant by the amount of the scholarship. Since the merit scholarship reduces need, that makes sense. You’re right, no net effect. But it’s also some indication of how much the school wants the student, and they may be more likely to meet a larger % of need for students they want.</p>
<p>I think it is also important that if family’s finances improve (which could happen over 4 years), as long as student meents gpa requriement, merit aid stays.</p>
<p>Our experience at privates this year was that the difference actually went to a gap. Where D was offered roughly the same grant aid (within $2K) at each school in the $35-40K range, those where she didn’t receive top merit aid had a larger gap.</p>
<p>I am sure it varies from school to school, I guess there really is no way to “know” for sure. Yes, if EFC was to rise dramatically in the future, I could see where the merit aid would be better. It makes sense that the schools would probably want the merit aid stats kid more than the others, but I am sure there are a lot of other factors like demographics, geography, etc, that might make a non-merit kid more attractive and thus get gigantic need based aid.</p>