I am curious - many college scholarships just seem like discounts?
Why Are So Many College Students Turning Down Free Money?
http://www.theatlantic.com/…/why-are-so-many-colleg…/386003/
The money is not free. They are buying your kid’s scholarship achievement. Schools are trying to move up in ranking, to do that they need to improve their students’ stats.
The article in question is discussing high school graduates who do not fill out the FAFSA form and the amount of free money that goes unclaimed, not necessarily scholarship money that college and universities offer to their incoming students.
The money is free if you qualify for the grant.
@oldfort, sure, just like a restaurant with free dishes is buying my patronage. If I like the food, why should I care whether it is “free” or “not free”?
A restaurant offers you free dishes in hope of you would go back again once you have tasted their good food, so the food isn’t free. A better analogy would be an up-and-coming night club offers free drinks and entrance to pretty girls so they could attract more paying customers.(this club must be hot if there are so many good looking girls).
I could not find the article after scrolling down the posted link. If indeed a student doesn’t try for free money from the school of choice that’s one thing. However- choosing a more expensive option over discounts is another- you may get what you pay for.
It’s a weird article. This is how they estimated the amount of “free money” left on the table:
So it includes students that didn’t go on to college and those who didn’t fill it out because they’re full pay and don’t see the point.
The rest of the article goes on to talk about how the FAFSA is only filled out by half of graduating high school seniors because the rest are stupid.
Oh, and as for “free food” or whatever… let’s not forget that some of the most generous colleges in the country have absolutely NO need for attracting “better” students.
As pointed out, this article is not about students turning down scholarships but about students losing out on potential assistance by not completing FAFSA. It’s also, IMO, poorly researched - the NerdWallet figure is greatly inflated by the assumptions that all high school graduate go onto college (only two-thirds of them do) and that all of those would get at least the average amount of the Pell grant payout (only 58% of of students who go to college get the Pell grant).
They also say that filling out FAFSA is a “laborious process,” but it’s really not - and definitely not as, let alone more, tedious than completing your annual taxes. I think that if your financial situation is complicated enough that it takes 10 hours to find your supporting documents, enter them into the electronic form, and check for errors, then you probably are quite wealthy and have someone on payroll to do the FAFSA for you anyway. The vast majority of families with simpler assets and income are not taking 10 hours - they’re taking up to maybe 30 minutes to find last year’s tax returns (it takes me about 5, since mine are stored electronically on my computer) and then about an hour to complete the form.
Anyway, as for the reason why people might turn down merit scholarships - variety of reasons. It’s often true that colleges use merit scholarships to try to raise the profile of their incoming class - so a college in which a student is in the top 10% of applicants might offer merit money to get the student to choose that college over a higher-tier one. I like the night club analogy in this case - the hope is that better students raises the overall incoming class profile, which then 1) attracts more of the students who are slightly below those top students in stats but who will be paying tuition, and 2) eventually attracts more high-stats students than the school can give scholarships to, raising both the overall stats and tuition revenue of the college.
However, there are always some students who are going to go the other way - turning down a large scholarship at Howard or Morehouse, for example, for the opportunity to go to Harvard or Princeton. (Those latter universities also give generous need-based aid, so it might not be much more money.) Moreover, maybe there are some concerns about the quality of education at some of the colleges - warranted or not. For better or for worse, some of the colleges that give out large merit scholarships to top students are striving for the top - which may mean that they are considerably below the top, and may mean in some cases that they’re tuition-dependent or struggling along on their endowment or having a hard time attracting and retaining top faculty.
@Julliet - very helpful - thanks!
I have no idea why other turned down the money, we never did that!
D. had about 10 college Merit scholarships that added up to full tuition and she did NOT turned down any single one! In addition, her college had “Returning student” Merit scholarships for those with at least 3.8 college GPA. She applied and got few additional thousands of dollars. She did not understand why most do not bother to apply to this one and she just took advantage of the fact that this reduced the competition for this scholarships. Practically all of her scholarships were private (at in-state public college) and she certainly is planning to contribute to her UG scholarship program when she can afford doing so. I hope that nobody would turn her money down, that would be an insult!
Answer is no - but what is free money in this context ?
FA and merit $ is not the same thing - at all . They may both affect your actual cost, but something like a NPC would certainly be a lot more enlightening than this vague article … and doesn’t even involve the FAFSA.
The article is sort of an embarrassment to both NerdWallet and Atlantic. Seems like some basic scaling using actual number of people going to college (2/3) and maybe some realisim in who could actually get Pell Grants would go along way.
If there are Pell Grant students taking loans rather than grants, that would make a much more compelling story, and would also help people understand what to ask kids of lower SES that want to go to college. Is this an issue with for-profile colleges, or poor counseling (why would HS not recommend applying for Pell for their poor students), etc.
Anyone with a income that does not meet the cost of attendance of a university they are interested in should apply for financial aid … is that a secret ? There are tables out there. The NPC indicates whether a school is likely to meet FA requirements or not.
The assumption by NerdWallet is everyone who didn’t complete the FAFSA would qualify for the average financial aid. If you know you exceeds the amount for any FA, why would you complete it. Example, the following famous people have kids in college and I doubt they completed the FAFSA: David Robinson, Madonna, Sean Puffy Combs.
If there are people who could have gotten more money from the college they ultimately attend if they had only applied for it, that’s too bad. I’m skeptical about how often that happens.
With respect to merit money, I’ll just note yet again that every student with the credentials to get accepted to highly selective colleges can get “free money” at other colleges. Families need to be prepared for what they will do when that happens.
From their web site (my bold)
So, it’s in their interests to make this a bigger deal than it actually is. As others have said, if you can show that people are leaving money on the table (ie, grants) but taking on debt instead, that’s a story and it would be good for people to know.
Full disclosure: we did not fill out a FAFSA because we knew need-based aid was not going to happen for our family. DS could presumably have gotten merit money at other schools, but we were not interested. Attributing a penny of “free money” to DS’s situation is a mistake at best and more likely intentionally deceptive.
“The assumption by NerdWallet is everyone who didn’t complete the FAFSA would qualify for the average financial aid. If you know you exceeds the amount for any FA, why would you complete it. Example, the following famous people have kids in college and I doubt they completed the FAFSA: David Robinson, Madonna, Sean Puffy Combs”
-This is assumption is just an assumption and not the fact. Some colleges actually strongly advise to fill FASFA to get a full range of MERIT scholarships. We did it religiously as advised and any kid who qualify for Merit awards should have done it, it would include all those kids who have David Robinson, Madonna, Sean Puffy Combs as parents. We also were nowhere near to qualify to a Need based (but a bit closer than these 3). Need based was ruled out for us at practically any college. As I said, we have been filling FASFA for 8 years and this year was the first one that we did not. We did not receive a penny in Need based FA, and we did not expect to receive any. And Merit awards are also called FA, they are “processed” thru the same FA office at colleges, and even loans are called FA and that is why we continued to file FASFA thru Grad. School (just in case that kid will end up applying for loans, although she never did).
And as far as I know the best scholarships are offered at specific college, not outside. D. had applied to numerous scholarships outside of college and received zilch , zero, none, it was just a waste of time. She got about 10 of them at her college without even applying to them, they were automatically awarded and all of them were 4 year awards as long as she maintains certain college GPA. I do not know who in a right mind would decline them, but I guess, I have to say huge “THANK YOU” to these people as they gave my kid a higher chance at getting them, the less competition, the better!.
Iirc, a few of the schools that offered merit money to frazzled kids required a completed FAFSA to secure the grant, even though we would not have qualified for need-based FA.
Just to echo Juliet, I have filled out my own FAFSA since the very beginning and have been a 0 or near-0 EFC for the whole of my education. Those of us who qualify for Pell Grants are definitely NOT spending anywhere near 10 hours on the FAFSA. Our situations are generally very simple and we get to skip a lot of questions due to simplified needs or auto-0 EFC. I have never spent more than an hour on FAFSA and that includes collecting all of the proper paperwork.
And the last FAFSA I filled out took all my info from my tax returns and I think it took me all of 5 minutes to do the rest.
A potential problem in the future is for those who need to request an IRS transcript of their past tax filings. The recent data breaches have made getting the transcripts fraudulently a major problem, and they will probably be more difficult to request. Keep a copy of your tax returns somewhere safe and accessible.
MiamiDAP, the story is about federal grant money from the federal government. It doesn’t have anything to do with merit money. I see it as a story using questionable data to make a point.
From the story, “The $3 billion figure is according to the online financial resource NerdWallet. Its researchers took the number of graduating high-school seniors who, during the 2013-14 application cycle, failed to fill out the FAFSA (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid), and multiplied figure that by the average amount of need-based Pell Grant money that was disbursed among the year’s grant recipients.”
A group pushing a questionable statistics to make their point and get traffic to their web site.
So they assumed that everyone who didn’t fill out a FAFSA would have gotten the average amount? That’s laughable. Neither of my kids filled it out, for good reason. I can eyeball it and know we’re not getting anything. And before you talk to me about merit money, they both went to schools that don’t give merit money.