ROTC and Financial Aid

[Bill1899]

Does anyone know what effect an ROTC scholarship has on financial aid. The schools I am looking at are mostly in the Northeast and all have a "sticker price" of between $50,000 and $60,000 total for tuition, room and board and fees. Using the "net price" calculator provided by the schools, however, it seems that someone with my academic record and family income would have an actual cost of about $20,000, ie: I would be getting $30,000 in grants and other forms of non-loan aid.

So here is the million dollar question - If I receive a $15,000 AFROTC scholarship, or other partial scholarship, does that reduce the $20,000 I am required to pay or will the school then say I am no longer eligible for some of the grants they would have otherwize provided to me.

If the latter is the case, it seems that the ROTC scholarship is not really all that worthwhile because at the end of the day the amount I will need to pay will be the same with or without the scholarship.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You

 

[goaliedad]

Does anyone know what effect an ROTC scholarship has on financial aid. The schools I am looking at are mostly in the Northeast and all have a "sticker price" of between $50,000 and $60,000 total for tuition, room and board and fees. Using the "net price" calculator provided by the schools, however, it seems that someone with my academic record and family income would have an actual cost of about $20,000, ie: I would be getting $30,000 in grants and other forms of non-loan aid.

So here is the million dollar question - If I receive a $15,000 AFROTC scholarship, or other partial scholarship, does that reduce the $20,000 I am required to pay or will the school then say I am no longer eligible for some of the grants they would have otherwize provided to me.

If the latter is the case, it seems that the ROTC scholarship is not really all that worthwhile because at the end of the day the amount I will need to pay will be the same with or without the scholarship.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You

The good news is that ROTC scholarships are not considered "financial aid" for purposes of eligibility for Federal financial assistance. Any Pell Grants, Subsidized loans, etc. would not be affected.

The bad news is that schools can award their need-based aid any way they so desire. If they choose to consider your ROTC scholarship as part of you family contribution, consider yourself lucky. You will need to contact the FA departments at each school to find out their policies regarding how ROTC scholarships affect their need-based aid.

There is no blanket answer to your question.

 

[marciemi]

None of the schools my son looked at (also mostly East Coast) allowed you to use the scholarship to reduce what they believed you could pay and I thought that was the case at most schools.

Meaning that if the school costs $55K and your estimated FAFSA (or CSS or whatever the school uses to calculate what they believe you can pay) says you can pay $20K, then they expect you to pay that $20,000. The additional scholarships would reduce THEIR financial aid, not yours. So in the case above, if you received a $15,000 ROTC scholarship, ROTC would pay $15K, you would pay $20K and the school would pay $20K.

The big difference though is that some schools promise to meet full need while others don't. A full need school would be as above but those are very rare. In that case the ROTC scholarship could be of a lot more use to you since the school might only offer $20K or so anyway towards that total price.

The one place this gets hazy is that a lot of schools expect the students to make a contribution towards the education (around $6K) that we found some schools let this scholarship be applied towards (so in that first scenario they might use $6K of the $20K they thought you "could" pay - if they met full need - from your ROTC scholarship and then pay $26K in FA). But they might not in other cases.

In our case, I have two sons at MIT (a full need meeting school) - one in NROTC, one not. The NROTC son has his tuition and books paid by them and we get nothing from the school and have to pay room and board (around $15K a year). My younger son currently gets around $30K in FA and we pay the remainder. But the older son gets none of that FA since MIT believes we can pay around $30K for him if we wanted and the remainder after ROTC is less than that.

 

[Pima]

As for AFROTC the type of scholarship is what you need to be concerned with along with the cost.

AFROTC only pays for tuition. So don't place the entire sticker price into your cost, just tuition.

Additionally you need to look at the type of scholarship when you place that inot your equation. Only type 1 will pay the entire tuition bill. Let's say the tuition bill is 28K>
~ Type 1 will pay the 28K, leaving you with only R & B costs.
~ Type 2 will pay 18K and you need to find the other 10K + R & B cost.
~ Type 7 will only pay UP TO the IS tuition cost, maxing out at 18K. If you are OOS and the college will not waive it to IS, you cannot use the Type 7 4 yr scholarship, you can convert it to a Type 2, 3 yr.
~~~ Ex: UMDCP charges way over 18K for OOS and does not waive it for ROTC cadets, thus you can't use a type 7 as a freshman. However, TAMU will charge IS rates for OOS cadets and you can use a type 7.

I hope that explains to you why from a fiscal position for AFROTC your premise is totally off the mark in 2 ways.

One last thing to understand about AFROTC scholarships. All AFROTC cadets must attend SFT to commission. This occurs the summer of their rising C300 yr (jr). It is a board that you meet in Feb of your C200 yr. Scholarships are masked, they do not place into the equation at all. Thus, have a conversation with the folks of what if you are not selected and dis-enrolled for the remaining 2 yrs? How will you pay those yrs without that 18K a yr.?

I will say that the AFROTC scholarship cadets that I personally know also get great merit packages from their schools. Some still need to take loans, but others who decided financially they didn't want to have college debt went free because they attended the college that offered the sweet merit with AFROTC scholarship. It also allowed them not to have the burden of worrying about SFT as a means of staying at their college.

~~~ Merit scholarships usually require a much higher cgpa than the AFROTC scholarship, hence the SFT issue is not a problem usually. For ex: our DS was both, but his merit required a 3.2, not the 2.5 for AFROTC. He didn't want to ever get near that 3.2, so he maintained a 3.4+. He was a non-tech scholarship, the avg cgpa for SFT is 3.3.-3.4. He found that out when he got SFT, and was thankful for the merit, because he will admit, he might have not pushed himself as hard academically if it wasn't for the merit...probably would have pulled a 3.1. If he had he would have lost his AFROTC scholarship even though he would have been 0.6 cgpa higher than their scholarship requirements for AFROTC.

 

[USNA17 Hopeful]

I KNOW I can't be the first to receive an NROTC scholarship...so could somebody please direct me to the right thread? I saw the online status change saying that I got my top choice, Drexel, yesterday (UPenn is the host unit! And it just so happens that Drexel covers room and 25% board for their ROTC scholarship students. Good luck to everyone else!

 

[Goarmymom]

Does anyone know what effect an ROTC scholarship has on financial aid. The schools I am looking at are mostly in the Northeast and all have a "sticker price" of between $50,000 and $60,000 total for tuition, room and board and fees. Using the "net price" calculator provided by the schools, however, it seems that someone with my academic record and family income would have an actual cost of about $20,000, ie: I would be getting $30,000 in grants and other forms of non-loan aid.

So here is the million dollar question - If I receive a $15,000 AFROTC scholarship, or other partial scholarship, does that reduce the $20,000 I am required to pay or will the school then say I am no longer eligible for some of the grants they would have otherwize provided to me.

If the latter is the case, it seems that the ROTC scholarship is not really all that worthwhile because at the end of the day the amount I will need to pay will be the same with or without the scholarship.

Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You

My son received an AROTC scholarship to VMI, and we lost a state grant from Virginia, as well as a financial aid scholarship from VMI. But we still had the ability to take out federal loans.