College decision: Scenario #2

Scenario #2: You get into your first choice college but you get a disappointing scholarship (or no scholarship at all).

Here’s what you should do:

When you open your acceptance letter and see a disappointing scholarship amount, you are bound to have mixed feelings. You got in! All your hard work paid off! But they barely gave you any money. What is wrong with them?!

The way to handle this situation is similar to the strategy for scenario #1. File your acceptance letters and materials away and wait for your other letters to arrive. If you receive more money from your other choices, you have a couple of options. First, obviously, you can go to the school that offers you the most money. That nice bottom line shows you that they want your attendance badly.

However, you have another alternative. You can use the offered money from another school to motivate your first choice into coughing up some scholarship cash. If the admissions officers see that you have the incentive to go to another college, they might be willing to up the ante. The scholarships from your other prospective schools might mean more scholarship money from your first choice college.

Full disclosure: don’t expect full tuition from the first-choice college. Using the other choices as leverage might mean more cash, but the admissions office can’t offer you double or triple their initial offer. That is just not realistic.

This scenario is the perfect case for choosing the best school that offers you the most scholarship money. As disappointing as it is to not receive a high amount from your dream school, you need to consider how much college will cost without a nice financial aid package. Sure, try to use the other schools as leverage for more money, but don’t count on getting a lot.

The best thing to do, again, is to wait and see. It could be that your second choice school — the one that offers more money — is a better overall fit for you.

NextStepU knows that you will be on the look out for your acceptance letters during the next month or two. We’ll advise you on how to make the best possible decision. Keep an eye out for more acceptance scenarios over the next few weeks!

Written by Rachel Montpelier. Rachel is a senior at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y. and is the editorial assistant at NextStepU.

> Looking for more advice on navigating your senior year? Register at NextStepU.com and customize your path to success.