Outside or Private Scholarships

To continue last week’s chat about the FAFSA, many families ask about looking for outside scholarships. This is a tricky one. If your child has earned any scholarship from a community organization (for example), you must report this to the school. What typically happens is the following: say your child earned a $1000 per year scholarship. Now let’s say that the school was going to offer your child $15,000 per year in grant money (need-based aid). What typically happens is the school will now reduce the grant money to $14,000 since you already got $1000. Personally, I don’t think it’s worth the trouble to spend all the time required to seek out scholarships and apply for them. Your child should do amazing in school, be involved, take on leadership roles, etc. and hope for a lot of merit-aid from the schools that really want him/her. You can certainly check the policy of each school because not all schools replace the need-based aid they were going to give your child with outside scholarship funds. You can ask if scholarships can be stacked.

Merit aid is a firm number awarded by the admissions department that will not get reduced. If your child wasn’t going to be receiving need-based aid from the school anyway, then outside scholarship money will still help your child no matter what because there is no way the school could replace those funds. The amount of outside scholarship money will be taken off your child's college bill if your child doesn’t qualify for need-based aid from the school.

If your child will not qualify for need-based aid, the best way to get the most amount of money from a school is to have a balanced college list. The more that a school wants your child to attend, the more money they will offer to your child. Typically, the students who have the strongest academic profiles or possess other qualities (institutional priorities) the school is looking for are those who will receive the most merit-aid (scholarships).