What You Should Know About Financial Aid and Scholarships
What You Should Know About Financial Aid and Scholarships
As you hear back from colleges this March, acceptances may come with financial aid and scholarship award letters that sweeten the deal.While your family’s income determines the amount of need-based aid for which you may qualify, students from more affluent backgrounds can earn merit aid or athletic scholarships. Yet, even if a top-choice school does not give you the aid you need, there are still independent organizations that provide scholarships for students from all backgrounds.In this post, we will take a deeper look at the types of financial aid and scholarships you may encounter as admittance letters arrive in your mail.
Academic Merit Scholarships
Academic merit scholarships are awarded to students who have shown excellence in their intellectual explorations. They likely have strong grades, have investigated an academic subject outside of the classroom, and/or are an overall standout student in comparison to the rest of a college’s applicant pool.Opportunities to apply to merit awards offered by colleges and universities may have already passed. USC, for example, considers all students who submit their college application by December 1st for their various merit scholarships, some of which offer recipients four-year, full-tuition awards amounting to over $200,000. And then there are scholarships you can only apply to through an invitation from the school, such as Columbia’s Egleston Scholars Program. However, many merit awards are given to students without them having to do anything other than submitting an application for admission. Because a school may be especially interested in you and know that you will have other compelling college options, they add in a merit scholarship to make attending their school more worthwhile. You only need to accept their offer of admittance in order to receive the aid.But be sure to read the fine print when you weigh your options in light of these scholarships. A $10,000 award may feel like a lot of money, but it won’t make a huge impact if your annual tuition costs $50,000—not to mention the expenses of room and board. Moreover, some merit scholarships will have contingencies, such as requiring that you maintain a certain GPA or study a particular discipline. Do not be seduced by the glamor of what may seem like a large chunk of scholarship money; take time to carefully weigh your options, thinking about what factors are necessary for you to thrive in college.
Athletic Scholarships
Scholarships are awarded to student-athletes by Division I and II schools. In most cases, this means that you must first be recruited by a coach to play a sport at the collegiate level in order to earn an athletic scholarship. While full rides are seen as the golden ticket for many high schoolers devoted to a sport, these are far and few in-between, awarded only to 1% of all student-athletes.In fact, only 2% of student-athletes receive any type of athletic scholarships from a university; and getting injured or being unable to play for whatever reason could jeopardize them from continuing to receive those scholarships. The good news is that students who want to compete in a collegiate sport can still receive merit and need-based aid and apply to scholarships from independent organizations.
Need-Based Scholarships
A significant number of colleges and universities in the United States bolster a 100% total demonstrated financial need policy, meaning that if you are accepted, the school will provide you a financial aid package that will account for every penny of your need in consideration of what your family can reasonably contribute.Financial aid packages usually feature a mixture of institutional and federal grants, work study, loans, as well as an estimated amount of expected family and personal contribution. Most colleges will try to make sure that you only take out a modest amount of loans so that you do not graduate with crippling debt.By now, students interested in need-based aid should have completed the FASFA and CSS Profile (required by many private institutions) and can expect to receive financial aid letters along with their college acceptances. If you have not received an award letter from a school you were accepted to, make sure to review your college portal and call their financial aid office to check in.Finally, even if you have not filled out the required forms, it may not be too late for you to apply for financial aid. Give the college a call as soon as possible to ask about your options.
Scholarships from Independent Organizations
Outside of scholarships and aid provided by colleges and the federal or state government, there are tons of organizations out there that give scholarships to students—sometimes for the most peculiar reasons. There are scholarships for students who have lived in a certain region of the United States, who are left-handed, whose parents work for a particular company, you name it. There’s even an award for if you’re interested in clown school. Yes, that’s right!There are certainly scholarships that you qualify for out there. You just have to sort through the incredible number of options available to find ones that are worth applying to. FastWeb is a great resource for searching the thousands of potential scholarships out there that might match you. Spring is the perfect time to get started, especially since you now have an arsenal of college essays to use for scholarship applications. And even if your parents are more than happy to pay your college fees, they’ll likely appreciate it if you could save them a few thousand dollars. Perhaps they’ll let you re-invest that money on pizza and dorm furniture!The expert admissions consultants at Wise World Prep have helped hundreds of students maximize their potential of being admitted to their top choice colleges and universities. Over 20 years, we have successfully guided students through each stage of the application process – from choosing competitive high school courses to building an appropriate college list to drafting winning essays to writing persuasive update and appeals letters. We would be happy to answer your questions and partner with you to create a successful admissions roadmap.Ready to get started? Schedule a complimentary 20-minute conversation today!Want to stay informed? Subscribe to our newsletter.See what others are saying about us