Negotiating with Negotiated Money Forum

[miguelfoogo]

Hi all,
I have two questions:

1. I have been negotiating scholarships, and it was my idea to raise the amount of scholarship I was offered at lower ranked schools before I went to the higher ranked schools to ask them to raise theirs. So for instance, I wrote to a 25 to 30 ranked school with evidence that a state school was going to give me a full ride. I asked if they could raise my award to match the full tuition scholarship and they said yes. I like this school, but my favorite school is one ranked a little higher.
I was planning on taking this new information from the 25-30 ranked school to ask if the 20-25 ranked school would raise my scholarship. However, this time if the school asks for evidence of my scholarship award, I will have to send them the e-mail from the other school that says they "were responding to my request" for a scholarship raise, granting me a higher scholarship, and hoped this would make it easy to attend their school now. Do people negotiate in this way?

If I do this, the second school will know that I have already been negotiating in the same way with another school?

[RodneyRuxin]

Probably, but there's not much to lose... They can only say "no."

[Shmoopy]

All that matters is what each school is offering to give you if you go there. It doesn't matter why the school is giving you a certain amount.

[miguelfoogo]

I guess the only risk is that i could just work with the original scholarship award i was granted from the first school, and i am pretty positive school B would raise my scholarship.

School A (25 - 30 ranking) originally offered my $120,000. I could just go to school B with this offer in hand. Their initial scholarship offer was $75,000. I am sure they will come up a little from 75. However, with my new offer from school A, I could got to them and show them $145,000 already in my hand. This might give me a little more negotiating power, but if for some reason they don't like this tactic and say no altogether, then it seems like I would have missed out on the raise i would have surely gotten just by showing them the first offer.

I guess the question boils down to whether or not they would be thrown off by a negotiated-scholarship being my matching offer?
Has anyone else done that? Provided the informal email where the scholarship has been negotiated higher as evidence of the offer? Is it standard to negoaiate with already negotiated amounts or unheard of?

[miguelfoogo]

Thanks schmoopy. That's what i was thinking when I started negotiating, but then I had second thoughts before I actually sent request.