How We Determined Your Award
In order to answer some of the questions that I am sure will be coming, I thought I would describe the process by which we award students (or put together financial aid packages for students). Much of this information is printed in the guidebook to the financial aid process, entitled “Making MIT Affordable”, you should feel free to refer to it as well for a complete run down.
The basic premise of the financial aid awarding cycle for MIT is contained in the following three formulas:
Cost of Attendance
- Expected Family Contribution
Financial Need
5500
- Excess Summer Earnings
- Total of Outside Scholarships
Self Help Amount
Financial Need
- Self Help Amount
Total Grants and Scholarships (MIT, Federal, State)
So what does all of this mean? Let's take them one at a time.
Cost of Attendance (COA) is defined as the total cost to attend a year at MIT. This is an average cost for all undergraduates, which includes an actual tuition cost and an average room and board cost. MUCH more information on our costs can be found in the booklet.
From the COA we subtract your Expected Family Contribution (EFC). Hopefully you already have a good sense of how we determine family contributions based on the material I have previously posted. If not, don't fear; the posts are easily found by looking under post categories on the sidebar of the page. If your EFC is less than your COA, we will display the figures on your award letter (broken down between PC - Parent Contribution - and SC - Student Contribution). Note that we do not separately display custodial and non-custodial parental contributions in the case of divorced or separated parents, nor can we provide this information if requested.
The remainder is your Need. This, if greater than 0, becomes the operative piece for the next part of the process. Note that if you have no need we still will send you an award letter, however your letter will simply display your eligibility for student loan and term-time employment. Of course, you are under no obligation to accept the offer we make to you.
If you do have need, the next item we need to determine is the amount of your self help. Your self help is the portion of your financial aid award which will be made up of term-time student employment and student loans. At MIT we do not make the decision for you as to which of these (work or loan) will be more appropriate to your situation; instead we let you choose how much you want to borrow and how much you expect to earn during the academic year. Your financial aid award will display an amount entitled “Self Help Offer” representing the total of what we expect you to contribute from these sources.
This amount (which starts at $5,500 for every undergraduate student) can be reduced in several ways. If you will be receiving funding from an outside private agency (i.e. National Merit, Gates Millennial Scholarship, Robert C. Byrd, etc.) we use the amount of this funding to reduce your self help. Another (less common) way we reduce your self help is by looking at prior year student earnings; if you earned a significant amount of money during the summer of the prior year, we take any amount of SC over our minimum SC (what we call “excess summer earnings“) and reduce your self help by this amount.
Once we have determined your self help amount, this amount comes off of your need, and the remainder of your financial aid is provided by a combination of Federal, State and MIT Grants and Scholarships. We meet the full demonstrated need of every undergraduate family who applies for aid at MIT. If you will be receiving a state grant of which we are not aware, this means that the state grant will reduce the amount which MIT is providing in your financial aid award.
That's it. Not much to it! Now you know how we determine your award (of course a lot more goes on behind the scenes but this gives you a good overview).
Next steps: send us the forms we've asked you to complete (the Self-Help and Outside Award Reply Form if you have a Self Help Offer in your financial aid award and the Student Information Review Form if a part of your financial aid award is covered by MIT Scholarship) as well as any other documents needed to finalize your financial aid award (tax returns, W-2 forms, etc).
Coming next on this blog:
1. Comparing Award Letters
2. When All You Wanted Wasn't Enough -- When and How to Appeal your Award
3. Seeing Us at CPW
4. Financing your EFC
In the meantime, sit back and relax. The hardest part for you is done. We will be very busy trying to complete awards for those students who completed their applications in the last week (as well as sending notes to student applicants whose files are still not complete).
If you need to reach me, you know where to find me... I hope you find this post useful.