The results of an ROTC Scholarship on need-based aid offered by the school of attendance?

Question

I have been offered a 4-year, Type-7 ($9000/yr) AF ROTC Scholarship. As this can only be used at a school where I would receive in-state tuition, I would have to convert it to a 3-year, Type-2 ($1500/yr) scholarship.

However, the univerity that I will be attending has also offered a significant amount of need-based financial aid in the form of grants.

So my question is (preferably to be answered by those who have had some experience with this), how would my acceptance of the ROTC Scholarship affect the distribution/amount of the need-based grant offered by the school?

For example, would the simply allow the grants to be applied towards things other than tuition (as ROTC scholarships can only be applied toward tuition), or would they merely subtract the amount of the scholarship from the grant, thereby resulting in no difference to the amount of aid I receive?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Though I don't have experience with ROTC scholarships, I do have some experience with similar situations.

What happens depends entirely on what your other scholarships and grants given by the school can be used for. In some cases scholarships or grants can be applied to tuition only and in some cases they will apply it to your total bill -- which often includes room and board.

Your ROTC scholarship would be considered an "outside" award which would be given priority over the school awards. Schools do this because it saves them money :) So they will apply your ROTC scholarship to the tuition first. Then, if there is any remaining tuition that the need-based grant can be applied towards, they will apply that toward the tuition. If that need-based aid can also be used toward room and board, they will deduct any remaining award from that.

In many cases, however, need based aid is only for tuition, so to get a clear answer you're just going to have to talk to your school's financial aid office.

If you don't want to disclose the ROTC scholarship, you may want to use is to call the financial aid office and tell them that you're considering accepting an outside award but you want to make sure that you don't jeopardize any of the aid the school is giving you. You don't have to tell them what the scholarship is but they deal with this sort of issue all the time so they will be happy to help.

Good luck and congrats on the scholarship!