Financial Aid and Scholarships: 2027 Overview

Financial aid and merit scholarships: a guide for families

Paying for college feels opaque because two very different systems go by the same name.

Need-based aid measures what a family cannot pay and tries to close the gap; merit aid is money a college offers to attract a student it wants to enroll. A single college may run both systems, one of them, or neither, and the two point a college list in opposite directions, so it helps to work out early which one matters more for your family.

The guide below covers how the arithmetic works, what the FAFSA and the CSS Profile ask for, and what the rebuilt FAFSA and the 2025 federal loan law changed, including the new caps on Parent PLUS borrowing. It also covers the three shapes merit programs take, the colleges that meet full need, and a timeline running from junior spring through April of senior year.

If you do one thing after reading it, talk about the budget as a family, in dollars, before the list is built. Then run the net price calculators for the colleges already under consideration, because that single evening of work turns every question in the guide into your own figures.

This is an updated version of the guide I shared in my newsletter. If you saved the earlier copy, use this one in its place.

MSquared_Financial_Aid_and_Merit_Scholarships_2026_4.pdf

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