Revised by: Kim Moy 9/14/05

2. If you filed a College Scholarship Service Financial Aid Profile, you will receive and acknowledgment form.  Not only will it acknowledge receipt of your profile but verification of where copies were sent (check this carefully).

 Evaluating An Awarded Offer:

In evaluating you financial aid offers, you must consider you educational objective as well as your financial needs.  Your education must come first when selecting a post-secondary institution.  Once you educational aspects have been considered, other factors should become part of your evaluation of financial aid offers.

 Primary among those factors is the creation of awareness that the largest financial aid package is not always the best.  Because of differences in cost of attendance, the largest offer in terms of dollars can also be the one with the greatest gap between cost and available resources.  If the gap or “unmet need” cannot be realized from other sources, the largest offer may not permit enrollment anyway.

Even two offers that fully meet the need may not be equal.  Packages containing equal dollars and similar unmet needs are not always the same either.  One may have a higher proportion of gift aid and, consequently, less loan and work obligation.  Even equal loan amounts are not necessarily the same level of obligation, due to different terms and conditions.  If the estimated student expense budget used to calculate need is unrealistically low, you may have more real unmet needs than the award letter suggests.  Some institutions estimate their costs conservatively to imply a more complete meeting of need than actually exists.  To verify reasonableness, you should compare the stated costs with those of similar institutions and CONSULT YOUR COUNSELOR.

By the same token, not all scholarships are the same.  Some are automatically renewable, others are renewable under certain conditions, and some are nonrenewable and good for the first year only.  For some students, certain types of packages are better than others.

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