<p>*With some privates approaching $60,000/year, merit aid will not put much of a dent into the COA.</p>
<p>True, especially when the merit aid just replaces some of the need based aid. D got the highest merit award at a prominent women’s college and it still ended up being among the most expensive option.*</p>
<p>Maybe at some point, some of these schools will need to stack merit onto FA to make the merit more meaningful. After all, a $20k per year merit scholarship is meaningless if the same school would have given $20k in need based grants anyway to the same student. It’s one thing to replace loans with merit, but when it reduces grants, what’s the point?</p>