- One thing you should
know is that colleges can actually reduce their
own financial aid package on a dollar for dollar basis by the amount of any outside
scholarships you receive. So for instance, if you
received an outside scholarship from a private corporation, or from a private
philanthropic organization, like the Soroptimist Club. This is called scholarship
displacement or stacking. Now if you receive an outside scholarship, the schools will first look potentially to see if you have any unmet
need that they were not able to meet in their own
financial aid packages. The vast majority of
schools will allow you to reduce any unmet needs you have with the outside scholarship before they reduce their own aid package. And then if there is no unmet need, most schools will first reduce
the loans they're giving you before they reduce the free money, or the grants and scholarships. This is very individual
to each school, however. It's great if they
reduce the loan package, because that means there's less
money you have to pay back, especially when the private or outside scholarship is free money. However, again, it really
depends on the school, and there are still a minority of schools who will actually reduce their
own grants and scholarships by the amount of the outside scholarship. So in that case, it really doesn't matter if you have a private scholarship
or not, either way you're, you know you're not
gonna get any more money. So an example would
be, let's say a college gives you a $15,000
grant and a $15,000 loan, and you have a $10,000 outside scholarship from a private corporation. Hopefully the college would reduce the $15,000 loan package first, so all of a sudden you're only having to pay $5,000 in loans back. But it is conceivable
that they will reduce their grant package by $10,000, in which case it's kind of a wash in terms of having that
outside scholarship. Some aid they will never reduce, this is called first dollar aid. And an example of that
would be the Pell Grant, which is going to be $57, $175 each year. In that case, the Pell Grant is a lump sum that is never reduced because
the federal government really has enough money to cover that, regardless of whether you have
outside scholarships or not. You are required to report all of your outside private
scholarships to your university. So you really need to check
with those schools first before you go spending
lots of time and effort on applying for outside scholarships to see how they treat outside scholarship in determining their aid packages or in reducing their aid packages. Also realize that outside
private scholarships are usually, although not always, only one year awards. So you need to make sure
then that after that year in which you have that
outside scholarship, your college or university
realizes that you don't have it in your sophomore,
junior, and senior year, and so that if they reduce the aid package when you did have the scholarship, they re-up the aid package when you don't.
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