Reply to 250k household income - did you receive any aid in financial aid packages?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "250k household income - did you receive any aid in financial aid packages?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What is the difference between merit and financial aid? [/quote]

In addition to the answer provided above (financial aid is need-based, merit isn't), I'll add:

- At some schools, merit aid is an honor awarded only to a small number of people. At other schools, virtually everyone gets merit aid, becoming essentially a form of tuition discounting. There may be wide variation in the size of merit offers, though.

- Most elite schools don't offer merit aid. But the most elite schools are unusually good with need-based aid (financial aid); their endowments allow them to make financial aid offers to a wider a range of families, including those that are middle class.

- Schools in less popular locations (Grinnell in Iowa, for example) offer merit in ways that similarly ranked schools don't -- as part of a strategy to getting students to commit to these areas.

- Different schools make different choices. Skidmore, for example (ranked 38) apparently gives basically no merit aid, while a number of schools with higher rankings give substantial merit.

- Merit at many private colleges might take 10-35K off the sticker price, but that won't be enough to with public ones. But once you get to a certain point (for LACs, I'd guess it's colleges ranked 70+?), the merit offers can bring the cost of attendance in line with (or even below) public colleges. As one example, a number of people on here have said that College of Wooster (ranked 75) made offers that were near or below cost of their state flagship.

- You can figure out what the average merit aid is by looking at a school's Common Data Set, which most publish on their web site.

- Read Jeff Selingo's Book "The Price You Pay for College." It's really quite helpful. 
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics