Athletic, Academic, Merit....oh my!

CaCO3Girl posted:

So we toss around words like scholarship but what does that mean?  Does it 100% cover books and room and board? Or do we say 100% and that is tuition only?   I've heard of Athletic money, Academic Money, Merit money and percentages.  But what does it really cover?

Can anyone chime in for us younger people that are going through it now with a decoder ring and say what these percentages and type of money really mean to the bottom dollar?

i.e. so a D1 offers your kid 75%...what is that 75% of?

So a D2 offers your kids 40%....what is that 40% of?

This is my understanding.

There are two "budgets" a sport keeps for scholarships.  The first is for the NCAA.  It is the percent everyone talks about.  It is how the "accounting" works for the 11.7 scholarships.  It really doesn't mean anything to the student or you. But it seems to be how all the parents talk about it, compare, and stick there noses into it.  

The second is a monetary budget.  That is what the school offers the kid.  Figure out tuition, room and board (or off campus living costs/apartment) books, labs, fees, parking, general.  Look it up on there website.  Deduct your athletic money from the total.  That is the student's responsibility.  Then look at other merit/academic aid and see if you project to qualify.  It's up to the student to apply/earn/qualify for.  Anything remaining is out of pocket.  And that is most likely your pocket.  "What's my Out of Pocket for school A vs school B?" is the best way to compare offers across schools on the financial side.

If big giant Private School costs $50,000 a year offers your son 50%, and regular sized State School costs $12,000 and offers your son 25%.  It is kinda useless to compare the two based on percents.

As I was told early on in business, you can't deposit percents in a bank.

On Academic/Merit type aid, you are most likely making a projection into the future on if your son will qualify.  Say it is HS GPA or ACT score, you are looking a couple years out and may not be at the standardized test scores yet.  And of course HS is not over.  So you are projecting your student forward.  And pay attention if the academic/merit aid has requirements to keep it in 2nd, 3rd, 4th year.  "Must maintain 3.3 GPA each semester", etc.  That can be a big financial risk for a family.

My thoughts are to ignore any talk of percents.

Go44dad posted:

 

 

As I was told early on in business, you can't deposit percents in a bank.

 

so true, it is mostly part of the formula to help evaluate the risk associated with getting the $'s

Go44Dad - Well explained especially regarding the two "budgets".  

CaCO3Girl posted:

Can anyone chime in for us younger people that are going through it now with a decoder ring and say what these percentages and type of money really mean to the bottom dollar?

i.e. so a D1 offers your kid 75%...what is that 75% of?

So a D2 offers your kids 40%....what is that 40% of?

The onus is 100% on the recruit (and parents) to understand the offer. Most schools will present the offer in their most favorable terms. A college coach might offer the recruit "100% of tuition", because 100% sounds great. That may be a 50% equivalency scholarship for NCAA reporting.

In my experience, parents tend to throw around the percentage as described to them by the coach. I recently heard that a local D2 baseball kid is on "75% scholarship". I cringe at announcements like this, because they set false expectations for the kids coming up. This 75% scholarship was actually 75% off of the list price of tuition. This particular school currently offers what amounts to a 57% tuition discount to every undergrad student. For NCAA reporting, his baseball scholarship was probably about 25%.

The bottom line is the offer on paper. And as we've discussed here many times, circumstances can change after Year 1, regardless of what's on paper.

Related posts:

http://community.hsbaseballweb...tate-vs-out-of-state

http://community.hsbaseballweb...-of-college-baseball

Go44Dad does a good job of outlining the different sources of funding.

What you need to do is to normalize all offers to dollar values against cost of attendance for the schools as a means of "comparing" for yourself.

When son received offers, there was no standard that every school used.  Some would talk percent, others would talk about line items (i.e., we'll cover room, tuition & books, or we'll cover everything except fees, etc).  Some would simply offer a $ total.

The first thing I would do is break all of it down to actual dollar values, so actual dollar value or tuition, etc., etc..  Then I could determine what the total dollar value of the scholarship offer was (which is all that really matters), and then could compare that to the cost of attendance to determine what my out of pocket would be (again, all that really matters).  Most of the info you need for schools is available online (cost of tuition, fees, books, boarding, meal plans, etc.)

This factors in out of state, other monetary resources (academic or needs based), etc.

Then and only then can you have a real understanding of the offers, how it impacts your financial well being and your ability to cover your end.

And to your question of "70% of what, 40% of what?", you need to ask the coach offering.  You can't assume that what Coach A says will mean the same thing as Coach B.  One may be referring to Cost of Attendance and the other may be referring to just tuition.  Only way to know is to ask THAT coach.

Son's school gave a dollar figure for each year, because "it is easier to keep track".  I believe they were just recently fully funded, from several different sources.   Ok, we understood that and knew the scholy could change each year since it was only a one year guarantee.  They even projected a slight bump each year for tuition inflation.

We look up the COA.  We figure out what we as parents are going to contribute.  All is good and son accepts offer.

Fast forward 2 years.  We get the bill from the college summer before Freshman year and tuition and fees increased 25% from the year before.  I thought I was going to choke.  Anyone that knows me knows that I am a numbers person, loves a budget, and plans ahead.  WHO PLANS FOR A 25% INCREASE!  That is one full year extra tuition costs over 4 years!  (The slight good news was tuition was NOT going increase over his 4 years attendance). 

If you are given a % scholarship, it would be adjusted accordingly. 

Lucky for us, son's last year of college will now be on MLB's dime (but oh wait, MLB scholarship is stated in a dollar amount!  I wonder what the tuition increase will be when son eventually completes his degree??)  Not complaining at all...just stating the facts.

My son's offer was presented in dollars.....and before you accept anything or sign anything, I would suggest seeing it that way.  My son's school is essentially $20K including tuition, room and board.  We knew going in that if he got a baseball offer it would be the minimum...25%.  HIs offer was presented as $5,000 for baseball....and $6000 for academics.  $5000 of $20k is 25%....exactly what we had figured.  We were fine with that...and with the academic money we were really fine with it lol.   It doesn't matter if it's 25% of the total or 50% of tuition....you just need to know for sure....and every situation is different.   Out of state really throws the numbers into a spin.  Be very careful with that scenario.  Again, if you know dollar amounts, you know where you stand.

I did a spreadsheet that started with total cost of attendance for each school then had a column for athletic, a column for academic money, a column for "standard discounts" and then a total out of pocket cost of what we expected to pay. And really, i didn't care where money came from, bottom line, I wanted to know how much I was going to have to pay.

Then I just kept asking coaches and financial aid questions until i could get each offer to fit into my spreadsheet.

My biggest issue was on some out of state offers where the school provided specific discounts to any student with a specific ACT and GPA,. So ANYONE with a 3.2 GPA and a 26 ACT would get $2,500 off per year. A few coaches just said "you'll get that."

A couple of others said you had to meet NCAA requirements to get that (top 10% of class, 3.5 I think GPA or a combined ACT of 105). It was never clear to me if that was up to the school to determine or the NCAA, but I really pushed to get coaches pinned down on that.

Iowamom23 posted:

I did a spreadsheet that started with total cost of attendance for each school then had a column for athletic, a column for academic money, a column for "standard discounts" and then a total out of pocket cost of what we expected to pay. And really, i didn't care where money came from, bottom line, I wanted to know how much I was going to have to pay.

Nice work, Iowamom23. One more column in the spreadsheet is Value. A degree from Stanford is obviously more valuable in the long run than a degree from Big Sports State U. This list is not broken down by major, but still gives a rough idea of salaries by school.

https://www.payscale.com/colle...t/bachelors?page=101

Iowamom, the NCAA requirements are the threshold for any academic scholarships to be exempt from counting against the baseball team's limit of 11.7 scholarships. 

If an athlete gets an academic scholarship from a school along with an athletic scholarship, but doesn't meet one of those minimum requirements that you included, the value of the academic scholarship must be counted as if it is part of the athletic scholarship and included in the calculation of 11.7.

CaCO3Girl posted:

So we toss around words like scholarship but what does that mean?  Does it 100% cover books and room and board? Or do we say 100% and that is tuition only?   I've heard of Athletic money, Academic Money, Merit money and percentages.  But what does it really cover?

Can anyone chime in for us younger people that are going through it now with a decoder ring and say what these percentages and type of money really mean to the bottom dollar?

i.e. so a D1 offers your kid 75%...what is that 75% of?

So a D2 offers your kids 40%....what is that 40% of?

Timely inquiry.

I am finding this a dilemma in reporting scholarship amounts to you from the information gathered as I am not 100% sure of all it really amounts to without knowing the total COA or the school.

If someone says 50% athletic, 25 merit/academic I can't tell exactly what that might mean in terms of final out of pocket. 

However, most folks know their bottom line, in other words, what amount they have to cut the check for every semester.

What they tell you probably is what they want you to hear.

TPM posted:

CaCO3Girl posted:

So we toss around words like scholarship but what does that mean?  Does it 100% cover books and room and board? Or do we say 100% and that is tuition only?   I've heard of Athletic money, Academic Money, Merit money and percentages.  But what does it really cover?

Can anyone chime in for us younger people that are going through it now with a decoder ring and say what these percentages and type of money really mean to the bottom dollar?

i.e. so a D1 offers your kid 75%...what is that 75% of?

So a D2 offers your kids 40%....what is that 40% of?

Timely inquiry.

I am finding this a dilemma in reporting scholarship amounts to you from the information gathered as I am not 100% sure of all it really amounts to without knowing the total COA or the school.

If someone says 50% athletic, 25 merit/academic I can't tell exactly what that might mean in terms of final out of pocket. 

However, most folks know their bottom line, in other words, what amount they have to cut the check for every semester.

What they tell you probably is what they want you to hear.

 

TPM, one question this thread raises (I can't remember if you asked this in your survey or not) is how many made the decision based solely on scholarship dollars vs other factors.   

Midwest Mom posted:

TPM posted:

CaCO3Girl posted:

So we toss around words like scholarship but what does that mean?  Does it 100% cover books and room and board? Or do we say 100% and that is tuition only?   I've heard of Athletic money, Academic Money, Merit money and percentages.  But what does it really cover?

Can anyone chime in for us younger people that are going through it now with a decoder ring and say what these percentages and type of money really mean to the bottom dollar?

i.e. so a D1 offers your kid 75%...what is that 75% of?

So a D2 offers your kids 40%....what is that 40% of?

Timely inquiry.

I am finding this a dilemma in reporting scholarship amounts to you from the information gathered as I am not 100% sure of all it really amounts to without knowing the total COA or the school.

If someone says 50% athletic, 25 merit/academic I can't tell exactly what that might mean in terms of final out of pocket. 

However, most folks know their bottom line, in other words, what amount they have to cut the check for every semester.

What they tell you probably is what they want you to hear.

 

TPM, one question this thread raises (I can't remember if you asked this in your survey or not) is how many made the decision based solely on scholarship dollars vs other factors.   

If you can afford to send your player to play ball for 4 years, then scholarship amounts are irrevalent.

FWIW I did get a lot of "needs" based in replies.

Colleges get "tricky" with this. One school told my son they were making him the same offer as a kid who committed to that school last year...but was drafted in the first round and didn't make it to campus. But that kid was an in-state student and my son was an OOS student. True enough...but it was a difference in about $15K per year. Technically, I guess it's true...but in the the context of the conversation, I viewed it a little shifty. He ended up saying no (not for that reason) and I'm glad. 

I think when schools were talking about percentages, it was based on Cost of Attendance. At least that was my son's experience. Some gave dollar amounts and others gave percentages. At the end of the day, it's what is left to pay and the value of the institution that matter most, I suppose. 

My son's offer came in the form of "here's what will be left for you to come up with out-of-pocket from the COA number." To really figure it out, it only took one question: "Coach, what does this count against your 11.7?" They actually had to get back to me with that answer, so it wasn't quite so simple cut and dry for them, either. It was complicated by the fact that tuition was figured by non-resident and then a WUE waiver added back in. I think even when a school offers, they don't always even know themselves exactly how it works out until they sit down and do the math with admissions.