How to Read a College Golf Financial Aid Offer

A coach may describe a number in a call or email. The financial aid offer is the document that shows how the school is characterizing the package. Read it before you decide that a school is more or less affordable than another one.

Federal Student Aid describes an aid offer, sometimes called an award letter, as the document that “tells you what financial aid you can receive at a particular college or career school”. It also says “There’s no standardized format or delivery method for financial aid offers”, so two schools’ letters will not line up row for row. An athletics amount may appear alongside other aid, but it should not erase the distinctions between them.

Check whether the document is final. Federal Student Aid’s page on comparing offers says: “You might get a tentative aid offer from a school and then find that it changes later.”

Put each line from the offer into its own column. The goal is not complicated accounting. It is to stop a total from hiding what is actually being offered. Federal Student Aid sorts aid by “whether the aid is money that doesn’t need to be repaid, earned money, or borrowed money”, and its page on accepting aid says to accept it in that order.

• Grants and scholarships (not repaid): ask which are athletics, institutional merit, state, federal, or another category, and read the stated conditions. This is where a golf scholarship belongs. Federal Student Aid lists athletics among the reasons a school offers its own institutional aid, along with merit and field of study.
• Work-study (earned): a part-time job, not a discount. Federal Student Aid says “Federal Work-Study income isn’t guaranteed”: the student has to “find and apply for a job and will work to receive these funds”. The pay is earned through the year and arrives as a paycheck for hours worked, so it is not an automatic reduction of the bill.
• Loans (borrowed): identify the type and the terms before counting them as money equivalent to a grant. Federal Student Aid says the abbreviations “L” or “LN” on an offer often stand for loans, and “Sub” and “Unsub” for subsidized and unsubsidized loans. Of a parent PLUS loan it says “the parent, not the student, is fully responsible for paying back the loan”.
• Unexplained labels: ask the school to define them rather than guessing from the title. Federal Student Aid’s own tip is that institutional aid may be named after a successful graduate.

An offer is only meaningful in the context of the college’s published cost of attendance. Find the school’s current figure, place the written aid categories beside it, and ask what is still expected from the family. This is more informative than comparing a percentage or an offer headline alone. If the offer does not list the cost of attendance, Federal Student Aid says to ask the financial aid office for it.

Cost of attendance is an estimate of the whole year, and only part of it is billed by the school. Federal Student Aid tells families to make sure the figure “includes amounts you will pay to the school directly (such as tuition and fees) as well as other costs (such as living expenses, books and supplies, and transportation)”. So sort the cost side into two groups:

• Billed by the school. Tuition and fees, and housing and food when the student lives and eats on campus. Federal Student Aid’s work-study article calls these “billed expenses such as tuition, fees, and food and housing”.
• Estimated, not on the bill. Books and supplies, transportation and personal or miscellaneous expenses. The school estimates them. The family pays them to a bookstore, an airline or a grocery store, and the real amounts will differ.

Ask the college which lines it bills and which are estimates. Then add any cost the school’s figure leaves out. Federal Student Aid’s example is a longer commute, with its extra gas or public transportation. For a golfer, ask the coach which golf costs the program covers and which the player pays. Keep anything you add labeled as your own estimate. It is a planning number, not the school’s figure and not what you will end up spending.

Then work out the net price the way Federal Student Aid defines it: “subtract the grant and scholarship amounts on your aid offer from your cost of attendance”. Its article on evaluating offers starts the same subtraction from a total cost that is “the school’s cost of attendance and any anticipated additional costs”, so a cost you added in the step above goes into the starting figure. Loans and work-study are not subtracted. They are how part of the net price gets paid.

Everything in this example is invented. Example College is not a real school, the recruit is not a real player, and no figure is a typical cost, a typical golf scholarship or a prediction of any offer. It is laid out to be read, so it does not look like any school’s form.

1. The cost side (fictional figures)

• Billed by the school, $54,000. This is the part that arrives as a bill. Housing and food are in it only because this invented recruit lives and eats on campus. Federal Student Aid’s definition of cost of attendance uses living expenses instead “for students who do not contract with the school for food and housing”.
• Estimated, not on the bill, $5,000. The school’s estimate of what this student will spend elsewhere during the year. Nobody sends a bill for it, and a real family’s total could be higher or lower.

2. The aid side (fictional figures)

• Grants and scholarships, $26,000. The only lines that lower what the family pays. The athletics scholarship sits on its own line so it can be checked against the athletics financial aid agreement, which the NCAA says a Division I or II scholarship athlete is asked to sign. Ask of each line: is it for one year or more, and what has to happen to keep it?
• Federal Work-Study, $2,500. Not a discount, and not taken off the bill. It is the most this student could earn in a work-study job during the year: Federal Student Aid’s work-study page says “The amount you earn can’t exceed your total Federal Work-Study award.” The student has to find the job and work the hours. An undergraduate is paid by the hour, at least once a month. Federal Student Aid says the pay is typically for day-to-day needs such as food, transportation and school supplies, and that some schools let a student apply it to billed charges on request.
• Loans, $5,500. Borrowed money. Federal Student Aid says of federal student loans: “You’ll have to repay the money with interest.” The family can take less than the letter offers: “you have the right to turn down the loan or to request a lower loan amount”.
• “Total aid”, $34,000. This invented letter adds all three kinds of money into one figure. A real letter may or may not. Either way, the total is not the amount the family saves.

3. Two ways to read the same letter (fictional figures)

The $8,000 between the first two lines is the loans and the work-study: money the family repays with interest or the student earns by working. This invented family adds no costs of its own to the school’s figure, so the net price starts from the cost of attendance. In this invented case the family has to find $33,000 for the year, which is $28,000 for the school’s bill and about $5,000 of estimated costs. If the family accepts both loans, $5,500 of that is borrowed. The work-study pay only exists once the student has a job and has worked the hours.

Federal Student Aid puts the same point this way: the net cost is what you “have to pay out of your pocket, using earnings from work or loan funds that you borrow”.

To read a real letter the same way:

1. Mark every cost line Billed or Estimated. If the letter does not say, ask the financial aid office.
2. Mark every aid line Not repaid, Earned or Borrowed, and find the athletics scholarship.
3. Subtract only the Not repaid lines from the cost of attendance. That is the net price.
4. Subtract the same lines from the billed charges. That is roughly what is left on the school’s bill before any loan is accepted. Ask the school to confirm it.
5. Decide on loans last, and borrow only what the plan needs.

Once each letter has been read this way, the scholarship offer comparison guide puts two schools side by side in dollars.

Before accepting or comparing an offer, look for the aid year, any reply deadline, forms still required, and language about renewal or review. If the athletics portion is discussed separately, ask the coach for its written term and direct school-policy questions to the financial aid office. Federal Student Aid says the offer itself “will include directions on accepting aid”. If a form is still outstanding, the FAFSA and CSS Profile guide has a school-by-school worksheet for it.

For the athletics line, the NCAA’s scholarships page says three things worth holding next to the letter:

• Scholarships “are typically awarded year to year”, and renewal is not guaranteed. Division I schools can offer multiyear scholarships. Ask which this one is.
• If a school plans to reduce or not renew an athletics scholarship, “they must notify you in writing by July 1”.
• If it is reduced or removed, the student-athlete has “the right to appeal the decision through your school’s established process”.

Lines on an offer can also move each other. For Division I, the NCAA’s Core Guarantees page says athletics scholarships may be combined with other financial aid “up to the cost of attendance established by the institution”. Federal Student Aid says the same of aid in general: “all your student aid added together can’t be more than your cost of attendance”. So ask the financial aid office whether any line would change if another one went up, for example if an outside scholarship arrives after the offer. Our scholarship comparison guide, linked below, cites the Division I bylaws for that ceiling, including its Pell Grant exception.

Our college golf scholarship renewal guide explains why the renewal question should be read award by award. If you have two packages, use the side-by-side offer comparison guide after you have this first reading done.