Given that they're peer schools, the institutions were willing to up their respective scholarship offers as they competed for his commitment. "I leveraged my scholarship at one of the schools to get money out of another school, and I used that money to get money out of another school," he says. "I maximized the amount of money I was able to squeeze out."
3. Understand the nuances of a scholarship: Many undergraduate scholarships reward academic achievements made in high school, and maintaining the scholarship requires that a student clear low hurdles or none at all in college. This typically isn't the case in law school, McEntee maintains. Knowing what strings are attached to a scholarship, and your likelihood of meeting those benchmarks, will help you determine a scholarship's actual value.
If you inquire about a scholarship you've been offered and a school reveals to you that only half the students who received the same scholarship last year were able to maintain that scholarship this year, for instance, the scholarship can be considered about half as valuable, he says.
A school may require that a student maintains a 3.5 GPA to keep a scholarship, but that scholarship could ultimately be of little worth if students don't pry for more detail, McEntee adds. "You have to ask, 'What does a 3.5 mean based on their curve? How many people are getting this scholarship? And how many are keeping it?'"
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Reader Comments Read all comments (1)
Glad I Asked an Old Timer of DC 11:02AM March 21, 2011