Financial aid

Depends on the school. Both my kids schools stack. (both Northeast schools). There are a lot of small privates in the NE (think MAAC and NEC conferences) where the coaches really count on a kid qualifying for academic and or financial aid. There are minimum requirements you have to meet. It used to be a 3.5 GPA or 1270 SAT (ACT equiv). Don't know if there's still a waiver in place for exceptions to that. There was during COVID. With several kids in college at once that will affect your FAFSA as well.

@nycdad posted:

Depends on the school. Both my kids schools stack. (both Northeast schools). There are a lot of small privates in the NE (think MAAC and NEC conferences) where the coaches really count on a kid qualifying for academic and or financial aid. There are minimum requirements you have to meet. It used to be a 3.5 GPA or 1270 SAT (ACT equiv). Don't know if there's still a waiver in place for exceptions to that. There was during COVID. With several kids in college at once that will affect your FAFSA as well.

Thanks, Fafsa did away with the multiple kids in college rule, so now everyone pays everything essentially. The numbers are scary.

Many schools are now SAT optional. The GPA requirement I assume becomes more important in that situation.

@Northeastmom posted:

Thanks, Fafsa did away with the multiple kids in college rule, so now everyone pays everything essentially. The numbers are scary.

Many schools are now SAT optional. The GPA requirement I assume becomes more important in that situation.

The test scores are an NCAA rule, not school. And I also believe even if your kid attends a test optional school (my son's is this) you still need to meet the NCAA SAT/ACT requirement.

FAFSA will cover state aid as well. I know when we had 1 kid in college we weren't eligible for anything, but my 2022 started they both are receiving some state aid and I believe we'll lose it once the oldest graduates. This is NYS and qualifies for NYS schools (pub or private).

You should take a look at the NCAA Eligibility center for the NCAA class requirements. The standards are extremely low, but you'll want to make sure your son is taking the appropriate classes as in HS.

We are going through this right now (senior son who signed to play in a mid major school).

• SAT/ACT requirement was waived for NCAA eligibility for 2023s
• My son is going to test optional school.  However, SAT/ACT is required to qualify for academic merit scholarship
• All of the schools my son spoke to (all mid majors) says they do not stack athletic and academic.  The P5 schools my sons went to stacks athletic and academic.  The school my son is going to says that if he starts with academic, it is possible (but rare) to stack athletic in year 2.  But if he starts out with athletic, it is not possible to stack academic later on.

@atlnon posted:

We are going through this right now (senior son who signed to play in a mid major school).

• SAT/ACT requirement was waived for NCAA eligibility for 2023s

Does this mean waived as a requirement to play D1 or D2 ball, or waived as as requirement to be eligible to get academic along with athletic aid?

@nycdad posted:

Does this mean waived as a requirement to play D1 or D2 ball, or waived as as requirement to be eligible to get academic along with athletic aid?

D1 and D2.  Here's what it says in my son's NCAA eligibility dashboard.  Clock on the link to the automatic waiver criteria and you will see a PDF with the details.

-----------------------------------------

As part of the COVID-19 Automatic Waiver criteria, students initially enrolling full-time at an NCAA school in 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23 or 2023-24 are not required to submit a standardized test score for NCAA certification.

If your first full-time enrollment period falls within an eligible academic year (as defined in the COVID-19 Automatic Waiver criteria above), please mark this task as complete upon review of this information. This task WILL NOT prevent your academic certification from being attempted.

If your first full-time enrollment period does NOT fall within an eligible academic year (as defined in the COVID-19 Automatic Waiver criteria above), please contact the ACT or SAT testing agency and ask them to send your test scores directly to the NCAA Eligibility Center using code 9999.

That's reads as to be eligible to be on a roster.. But I don't see an exception for the requirement when it relates to combining athletic and academic. Which seems to be consistent with what I've seen with kids going in the last few years.

Test scores were also always related to GPA when it came to eligibility I think. Higher GPA, lower test score.

@nycdad posted:

That's reads as to be eligible to be on a roster.. But I don't see an exception for the requirement when it relates to combining athletic and academic. Which seems to be consistent with what I've seen with kids going in the last few years.

Test scores were also always related to GPA when it came to eligibility I think. Higher GPA, lower test score.

Sorry, I misread your question.  I answered the first part (waived requirement to play D1/D2) but missed the second part.  My response has nothing to do with eligibility to receive academic.  As far as I know, NCAA has nothing to do with the requirements for academic merit scholarship, right?  For my son's school, ACS/SAT is waived for admission purposes, but is still required to qualify for academic scholarship.

@Northeastmom posted:

Thanks, Fafsa did away with the multiple kids in college rule, so now everyone pays everything essentially. The numbers are scary.

Not sure what you mean by this.  The Fafsa is just a data-collecting form, what matters is what each school does with it.  At the schools my sons go/went to, when there were two in college in one year, each school calculated our EFC (expected family contribution) and divided it in half, and gave us the difference between that number and their total cost as need-based financial aid.  In fact, they came up with slightly different numbers.  But, these are pretty rich schools, so other schools might do things differently.  We found that their numbers about what we could afford were accurate.

@atlnon posted:

Sorry, I misread your question.  I answered the first part (waived requirement to play D1/D2) but missed the second part.  My response has nothing to do with eligibility to receive academic.  As far as I know, NCAA has nothing to do with the requirements for academic merit scholarship, right?  For my son's school, ACS/SAT is waived for admission purposes, but is still required to qualify for academic scholarship.

Correct, the NCAA  doesn't determine if your academics are good enough to receive academic aid. But NCAA rules state what aid you can receive along with athletic aid.

@nycdad posted:

Correct, the NCAA  doesn't determine if your academics are good enough to receive academic aid. But NCAA rules state what aid you can receive along with athletic aid.

Yeah, and this is what's frustrating.  From what I can tell, based on NCAA rules, as long as the merit based academic financial aid is available to all students and is objective (i.e. based on test scores and grades, nothing subjective that can be manipulated to give more money to an athlete), then the school should be able to stack.  As far as I know, the academic aid that my son's school provides fall under this criteria but they still don't allow stacking.  I don't understand why other than to save the school money.

@atlnon posted:

............ As far as I know, the academic aid that my son's school provides fall under this criteria but they still don't allow stacking.  I don't understand why other than to save the school money.

Bingo!  Many schools don't stack academic with athletic aid because they want to spread their limited scholarship funds across as many students as they can.

I even got to the point where I was wondering if the school stacks for more highly recruited athletes but we didn't get that deal.  I was told in this forum that when it comes to stacking, it's more of an institution policy, that they can't offer stacking to some and not to other recruits.

@anotherparent posted:

Not sure what you mean by this.  The Fafsa is just a data-collecting form, what matters is what each school does with it.  At the schools my sons go/went to, when there were two in college in one year, each school calculated our EFC (expected family contribution) and divided it in half, and gave us the difference between that number and their total cost as need-based financial aid.  In fact, they came up with slightly different numbers.  But, these are pretty rich schools, so other schools might do things differently.  We found that their numbers about what we could afford were accurate.

Right- that rule is going away. No longer will they use EFC. There is a new acronym and it does not take into account how many are in college. You can google it but the whole thing is nuts.

From an eligibility perspective, the NCAA permanently removed the standardized test requirement in January.

https://www.ncaa.com/news/ncaa...ules-coaching-limits

@Northeastmom posted:

Right- that rule is going away. No longer will they use EFC. There is a new acronym and it does not take into account how many are in college. You can google it but the whole thing is nuts.

O.k., but I'm still thinking that individual schools are going to adjust to the new information they get from FAFSA.  Many private schools also require the CSS, in addition to the FAFSA, and that also asks how many kids in college.  So, even if the FAFSA tells the school that the SAI (replacement for EFC) is $XX,XXX, the school can still decide to cut it in half if there are 2 kids in college.

I had two in college for one year, and the schools assigned different EFCs to us, based on the same information.  So clearly they were not using what FAFSA told them.  When we asked, we were told that each school has its own proprietary formula that they use to determine aid.

FAFSA is also used for Pell Grants, and for those, number of siblings in college might not matter.

@anotherparent posted:

O.k., but I'm still thinking that individual schools are going to adjust to the new information they get from FAFSA.  Many private schools also require the CSS, in addition to the FAFSA, and that also asks how many kids in college.  So, even if the FAFSA tells the school that the SAI (replacement for EFC) is $XX,XXX, the school can still decide to cut it in half if there are 2 kids in college.

I had two in college for one year, and the schools assigned different EFCs to us, based on the same information.  So clearly they were not using what FAFSA told them.  When we asked, we were told that each school has its own proprietary formula that they use to determine aid.

FAFSA is also used for Pell Grants, and for those, number of siblings in college might not matter.

Thanks, I am hoping exactly what you said is true. Not sure how average families with multiple kids will pay otherwise!

My experience, when I had baseball playing son enter college and I already had one in college (I had two in college for 2 years):

Filled out FAFSA and CSS profiles.  I knew ahead of time what the athletic scholarship would be.  After his acceptance, we got a nice grant.  Whoo hoo!!  Every dollar counts!

When the athletic award was applied in August, the grant went away.

I was a sad mama. 

Here’s an actual scenario I’d love to know how to handle. I saw a former teammate’s parent this weekend and having a 2024 they are ahead of us with recruiting. Mom mentioned that son received a 50% offer at a small d1 but the school is out of their price range still. She has a second child in college. Mom thinks they qualify for financial aid of 65% meaning if all grants the financial aid offer is better than the baseball offer. Being in season son hasn’t been able to clarify with the coach how the player can know if the school will fully fund with grants. When an offer is given, do coaches run numbers by financial aid to see what the player is likely to be offered in grant money? If the financial need package is better do they pull their offer? I can see a similar situation happening with my son.

The coach had us complete FAFSA and checked with admissions to see how much non-athletic money my son is eligible for.  He gave both numbers to my son (athletic vs. non-athletic).  Both numbers are similar but do not stack.  We chose non-athletic.  A few folks here in the forum said it was the wrong choice bec getting athletic money would make the coach more invested in my son.  I see it as getting non-athletic money helps the team more (frees up more money for others), and I would rather have the coach invested in my son bec of what he shows on the field.

@Northeastmom posted:

Here’s an actual scenario I’d love to know how to handle. I saw a former teammate’s parent this weekend and having a 2024 they are ahead of us with recruiting. Mom mentioned that son received a 50% offer at a small d1 but the school is out of their price range still. She has a second child in college. Mom thinks they qualify for financial aid of 65% meaning if all grants the financial aid offer is better than the baseball offer. Being in season son hasn’t been able to clarify with the coach how the player can know if the school will fully fund with grants. When an offer is given, do coaches run numbers by financial aid to see what the player is likely to be offered in grant money? If the financial need package is better do they pull their offer? I can see a similar situation happening with my son.

In our experience, coaches are overly optimistic on aid (small schools Northeast) outside of athletic and and academic. For my older son they were spot on. When it's 25% athletic it's a little more straight forward (right now until they allow less than 25%).

For my younger son, we were initially told a percentage, but it turned out that percentage was based on athletic and what aid the coach thought we *might* get. Always ask for clarification on where the money is coming from.

For example full ride may not mean full ride. It may mean tuition. Also I think there is always leeway. You're should have a pretty good idea what you're going to pay, but it's never exact.