Just like you mentioned on the last thread, while these scholarships are still active they could be canceled at any moment with budget cuts and I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. I also have won 7500 in scholarship money currently ( one from a local foundation and the other from my aunts company ), so while I know outside scholarships can’t pay for everything I’m considering schools that would be 15-20k a year and I could supplement with these+ job+ RA.
Be aware that many schools do not allow for stacking of scholarships so if you have a scholarship from the school itself and you then receive outside awards, you are required to report them to the school and they will likely reduce the amount of the scholarship they are providing. You should be able to research the schools on your list to see if they allow for stacking or not.
One of them gives the scholarship directly to the school the other to me. Do I have to report the one that’s given directly to me?
I disagree - if they’re out there at public colleges, they will be honored for this class. Maybe not next years but for yours.
What I said was you mentioned Natl Hispanic Recognition Scholarships.
I said verify with the schools they still exist. Some def ended after the Supreme Court ruling and some web pages may have been inadvertently left up. So verify.
If they were pulled after you started, it’d be honored for you.
What you are doing here, just my opinion, is fool’s errand. Lots of time, essays with little payback. It’s hard enough to apply to college. This is add on. For you to pay for college purely through small scholarships ( even combined with merit) is maybe possible for .1% if that.
Even if the Natl Recognition are gone and you said they’re not, you still have access to full rides so focus your time on others that have competitive ones like W&L. Worst case u have Troy, N Texas, or Prairie View. And there’s more.
Btw are u a Natl Recognition Scholar from the College Board ?
Yes!
Yes, at most schools you need to report outside scholarships paid to you.
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Yes.
Not an actual book. That’s a figure of speech. If someone writes the book on something, the know everything about it. She wrote this post: I won $292,500 in outside scholarships and almost $425k total. My Story.
But as this student is not getting need aid it shouldn’t matter. Unless perhaps they are over cost of attendance.
Or am I missing something ?
Become a pest in your counselor’s office. There are a lot of little scholarships that don’t get publicized and may go unclaimed. On scholarship night, 3 boys split a scholarship for making a ‘safety’ video and they did it on lasers being shined at airplanes, It was awful, and they got $500 or $1000. There were others sponsored by a photography studio in a nearby town (we were at the edge of a county, so many of the businesses were an hour or more away). A high school nearby, but in a different county, had a list that included some that our school didn’t (it was on the school website). Many in our area were for kids whose parents were military, but there were others.
Check with your colleges. They may have some. My daughter’s college had one for women living or going to college in certain counties. Your church may have some or know of some.
My kids got one from my father’s college fraternity, as did all my nieces and nephews.
Check with the department at your college. They might know of ones for specific majors.
Society of Women engineers has scholarships for high school and college women in engineering.
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This is why students have to report all outside scholarships to their school, even if the student doesn’t receive financial aid from the college. Colleges still have to make sure the student didn’t get more scholarships than the college’s COA…at least AFAIK this is still the case, even for students who don’t have any financial need (you know, lots of changes in the US Dept of ED.) @kelsmom?
OP should look at the scholarship policy for each school on their list. Some may still require any scholarships be paid directly to the college even though the student isn’t receiving any financial aid from the college. (And OP could very well receive non-need based aid from some colleges, provided the college offers non-need based aid.)
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Regardless of type of award, all outside awards still need to be reported to the college. This happened to a friend’s daughter even over a decade ago. She had her merit based award from the school, did a bunch of work for extras outside smaller awards, and she learned after the fact that she couldn’t stack anything and the school reduced the amount of her merit based award.
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Students are required to report all scholarships to the school. There are reasons for this. People typically say that the total of all aid cannot exceed COA. If there is any federal aid awarded at all, this is true … but it can also be true if there is no federal aid (and yes, there have been instances in which students have been able to receive aid that exceeded COA, but that is frankly too rare to bother discussing here).
Students who receive any kind of federal aid, including unsubsidized loans, cannot receive more than the school’s published cost of attendance (COA). Any federal aid (including loans) would have to be reduced if the total of all scholarships + federal aid exceeds COA. (Currently, a student could theoretically receive a full ride + Pell, but this very rarely occurs for several reasons, including school and association awarding policies that will reduce those awards in the amount of Pell received.)
Students who receive any aid from a school cannot receive more than the school’s COA. The school will reduce its aid if outside scholarships + school aid exceeds COA. There could possibly be a school that doesn’t do this, but I am not aware of any … but they would only be able to do this if the student isn’t receiving any federal aid, including loans. Pell could theoretically put them over COA … but every school I know has a policy that mirrors the federal policy of reducing its own aid to avoid all aid exceeding COA.
Students who are only receiving outside scholarships must still report these scholarships to the school. Some outside scholarships have a policy that they can only be used to cover tuition or that they can’t cover costs in excess of COA. I used to process these scholarships, and I often had to certify the total of tuition-only scholarships received or how much aid the student had already received.
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And fewer and fewer small dollar scholarships (sometimes referred to as “last dollar scholarships”) will cut a check to the student- even if they did in the past. No donor or foundation wants their money going to pay for the student’s mom’s boyfriend to spend a weekend in Atlantic City (yes, that’s a real thing). So when the policy is “we pay the scholarship directly to the student” it is often a euphemism for “the check goes to the university bursar with the student’s name and social security number on it”.
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