Is scholarship amount predictable? Forum

[LikelyThrowaway]

There are great resources for figuring out your odds of admission, but the scholarship percent/average on MyLSN seems kind of random and not too credible to me. Is there a way to predict this kind of thing?

[Hildegard15]

At least for me, MyLSN was pretty accurate in predicting my scholarship packages from schools.

[KMart]

MyLSN is a fair guess of what you will get. You can also go through the individual data points from the site to try and find similar applicants. It's like buying a home: find comparable data points and create a range.

[cavalier1138]

It's predictable to a certain extent. You can probably guess whether you'll get a little money, a good amount of money, or heaps and heaps of money with your numbers. But scholarship considerations vary more significantly by school, and as you start adding need-based into the mix, it changes things up a little. So scholarships are definitely the part of the admissions game where softs play a much larger role.

[mukol]

There are great resources for figuring out your odds of admission, but the scholarship percent/average on MyLSN seems kind of random and not too credible to me. Is there a way to predict this kind of thing?

Estimate, yes.

[Cellar-door]

You can estimate some based on those numbers, but they are going to be all over the place in part because unless it's a full ride, you should be negotiating up any offer and some people don't, plus year to year value of a score or GPA will vary. If they offer you a scholarship it means they actually want you for their numbers more than for your money, they can always get the money by pulling in some more filler or transfers.

Anecdotally, my initial offers were all pretty small from a variety of levels of schools, I used each to negotiate up the school just above them in terms of selectivity (so USNWR 30s against 20s, 20s against teens, teens against T14), then went back and forth with the two I was most interested in until I maxed out with offers that were about 5x (yearly) what the initial offers were.