You might have heard that private college scholarships are not as great as they seem because many schools will require that they be reported and will then just reduce the student’s aid package by the same amount as the scholarship. I have an offspring about to enter freshman year, got a story like that except actually it’s worse.

They have this 3k private scholarship, but it came with a couple conditions: the money must be transferred directly to the school and cannot leave its system, I assume to prevent it from being spent on anything fun, and it expires after 1 year, anything remaining is returned to the board. They’re attending the University of Texas, a school where less than 20% of students stay in the dorms because they’re ridiculously expensive and there aren’t nearly enough of them, and since we didn’t think to apply for housing back in like February my kid didn’t even have that option. They ended up landing in a non affiliated coop with its own meal program, aren’t paying tuition the first year due to another award, so all they were planning to spend to the school this year was for fees and books. As it turns out, nearly all of the money from this scholarship just ended up displacing grants that come with no conditions, which could have been used to pay for rent and gas, buy marijuanas etc.

So I guess the correct course of action would have been to retroactively decline the scholarship before the money hit the school, but we didn’t have the information required to make that decision, even theoretically, until about a month before everything was doled out, and that’s supposing we actually knew the rules they use when re-computing the aid package which I don’t believe is published anywhere and even after several calls to financial aid we didn’t get until 1 week ago, it’s like getting blood from a stone, and honestly I didn’t have any inkling that accepting a scholarship could actually hurt you financially so it didn’t even occur to either of us to press them harder for the information.

Anyway at least I’m glad my kid has learned this lesson early, that life is actually an incredibly intricate yet boring game of spreadsheets where you have to wait on hold for 3 hours and then roll a 20 to learn the formula used to populate each cell. On an unrelated note, does anyone know where I could offload around 150 hook-em horns T-shirts size XXL to XXXXL?