Think your income is too high for your child to qualify? Not so fast. Colleges do set aside grants specifically for well-off students. College Buzz Executive Director Rick Grisel shares smart ways seniors can increase their chances of qualifying for merit aid.
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>> Sumi Das: Getting merit aid might be easier than you think. Today, private colleges are devoting roughly 32% of their in-house grants to affluent students. Public universities budget roughly 60% of their grants.
>> Rick Grisel: There is a tremendous amount of merit aid out there for people to apply for.
>> Sumi Das: Rick Grisel is the executive director of College Buzz, and a former admissions officer. He advises college bound students on best practices for finding financial aid. He says that qualifying for merit based scholarships varies from school to school.
>> Rick Grisel: There are some schools out there that don't offer any merit aid at all. So for example, all the Ivy League schools and a few of their peer institutions that are very, very selective don't offer any financial aid on the merit side. But there are many schools that do.
>> Sumi Das: Grisel believes the ability for prospects to get merit-based scholarships is good right now. But he warns that there are more high school graduating seniors than ever before, so it remains very competitive. Grisel offers these tips to seniors looking to get an edge. First, lower your expectations and target schools where you would be a top applicant.
>> Rick Grisel: If I were a student with very high grades and scores, and some good extracurricular activities, I may want to steer a little bit away from some of those most selective, very difficult schools to get into. And take a look at some other schools that are also excellent academically, but may not be as difficult for me to get into. If I do that, I'll be one of the top applicants in their pool.
>> Sumi Das: Secondly, Grisel says build a relationship with the admissions office at the university you're applying to.
>> Rick Grisel: Build a relationship as much as possible with both the admissions office and the financial aid office. Admissions officers are very likely to go to bat for you with the financial aid folks if they feel that you're a candidate that can be yielded if they've admitted you.
>> Sumi Das: Yield refers to the number of students that decide to matriculate at any given school. So for example, if a school admits 10,000 applicants and 5000 accept, the school yielded 5000 students. Grisel adds if a college or a university has a low yield rate, the student may even be able to negotiate an appeal for more aid. And finally, research private grants and scholarships.
>> Rick Grisel: There's lots of money out there. The best way to do that is to go online to websites like fastweb.com and scholarships.com and take a look at what's available. There are many different types of scholarships and grants for all different types of people, a lot of which is not based on grades.
>> Sumi Das: For moneywatch.com, I am Sumi Das.
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