Scholarships for accepted EDs

Jeffwun
Thu, 21 Dec 2006 17:53:11 +0000

Well, my case isn’t typical. A couple of students will get a refund check, but very few get one as large as mine. Keep in mind that the purpose of a refund check is not to pay one to come to college. It is for misc expenses that are calculated in your expected cost of attendance. The COA is made up of tuition, room and board, and anything else that one needs to live @ the university (haircuts, laundry, random stuff, books, etc). You can have things added to your COA(the cost of a computer, etc). So if your COA is 50,000…the University is permitted to give enough aid until you hit that 50,000 mark. So one room and board and tuition are paid for (~45,000) the extra $5,000 is given to the student as a return check. How a student uses his or her return check is up to them though.

In my case, WU was very generous in giving me aid(need and merit) cause I actually needed it. My parents wouldn’t have been able to send me to college had I not have gotten scholarships. Also, WU allows you to keep your outside scholarships without detracting from the need based aid they give you (they will only start deducing need based aid if you hit the COA mark). I have two outside scholarships, one I am deferring for grad school, and the other is factored into meeting my COA. For example, once I got the Ervin scholarship, my Eliot scholarship was reduced to 12,000 so that I had enough to meet my COA but I wasn’t going over it. When I recieved a 2,500 outside scholarship, I tld them to add the cost of a 4,000 laptop to my COA, so I was able to keep the laptop without getting my aid reduced (I wasn’t gaming them, I actually purchased a 3200 macbook pro and 1,000 in programs). Next year; however, I can expect my my eliot scholarship to be reduced by about 2,000 because my COA will be decreased by 2,000 since I already have a computer.

So, the moral of all of this is that WU will try very hard to help you meet the COA through a number of different sources. You can also help yourself by applying for outside scholarships. Don’t think that refund checks are like wasting money on people who already have enough, because they are only extra financial aid dollars (usually from merit sources) that are given to students so they can pay for things outside of tutition and room and board that they actually need for school