Merit Aid

To dovetail on last week’s post, many people have misconceptions about merit aid and need based aid. A few recent SAT tutoring parents told me they were hoping their daughters could earn a 1000 or 1100 so a test optional school would offer scholarship money. Colleges don’t offer scholarship money to the lowest quartile of students. Rather, they use their funds to attract the highest achieving students or students that they really want to become a part of their community based on various institutional priorities.

You’ve heard me mention my Matchlighter student that I’m volunteering with through College Essay Guy. These students come from low income households and are very high achieving. (Mine earned a 1540 on the SAT, has an unweighted GPA of a 4.0 and a weighted GPA of 5.36 from a top public high school.) There are schools that will meet 100% of need as demonstrated on the FAFSA. If you go to the Common Data Set and look at section H2, you will see how a particular school prioritizes aid money. Most of the Ivies only give need based aid. If you want to check out various schools, you can see how many students with financial need were awarded aid and what percent of their need was met. You can also see how many students were awarded merit aid and how much that aid was.

I looked at Duke as an example. There were 1744 freshmen, and 906 of them applied for need based aid. 657 of those students were determined to have need, and all of them were awarded aid money. The percentage of each student’s need that was met was 100%. In that same class, 145 freshmen had no financial need and were awarded merit aid. So, 8% of their class earned scholarships and 38% of them have financial need and had 100% of their family’s need met. There is a whole different issue now that some students are afraid to fill out the FAFSA because they are afraid that the government will come after their parents due to their immigration status. Filling out the FAFSA is the way that students are able to earn need based scholarships.