I hear a version of this line at least once a week, usually said with a resigned little shrug: “We make too much to get any help, so we are not even going to bother looking.”
I get it. It feels responsible, even. You ran the mental math, you assumed the answer is no, and you decided not to get your hopes up. But here is the thing, said with love: that shrug could cost your family real money. Because it is built on mixing up two completely different pots of money, and only one of them cares what you earn.
Let me untangle it, because once you see it you cannot unsee it.
There are two kinds of college money, and they are not the same
Need-based aid is exactly what it sounds like. It is money a college gives based on your family’s financial need, calculated mostly from your income and assets through the FAFSA. If your household earns above a certain point, yes, you may get little or none of this. This is the part you are right about. When you say “we make too much for aid,” this is the aid you are picturing, and honestly, you might be correct about it.
Merit aid is a whole different animal. Merit aid is money a college gives because it wants your kid, full stop. It is based on your student’s profile, their grades, their rigor, their scores if they submit them, how they stack up against that school’s usual applicant. And here is the sentence I want you to underline: merit aid is not based on your income at all. A family that makes $60,000 and a family that makes $600,000 can be offered the exact same merit scholarship, because the college is not asking what you earn. It is asking how much it wants your kid.
So when you say “we make too much,” what you actually mean is “we probably will not get need-based aid.” That closes one door. The merit door is standing wide open, and your income is not even in the room.
Where merit aid actually comes from
This is the part that changes how you think about the whole process. The biggest merit money is not the scholarships you Google at midnight. It is not the $500 essay contest or the local Rotary award, lovely as those are. The biggest merit money is institutional, meaning it comes straight out of the college’s own budget, and it is often awarded automatically when your kid is the kind of applicant that school is trying to attract.
Why would a college hand your kid thousands of dollars a year? The same reason we talked about with demonstrated interest: they are competing for students, and they use their own money to win the ones they want. A school that would love to have your kid, a kid who sits at or above the top of its usual applicant pool, will very often sweeten the deal to get them to enroll.
Which means merit aid is not something you go hunt for. It is something you build a list to unlock. The single biggest lever your family controls is the college list itself. Include schools where your kid is a genuinely strong applicant, not just the reach schools where they would be scraping in at the bottom, and merit tends to show up. Load the list only with schools where your kid is average or below, and it will not.
One honest catch, so you plan around it
Merit aid is not everywhere, and I never want you chasing it in the wrong place. The most selective schools in the country, the Ivies and a handful of their peers, give almost no merit aid at all. Their money is need-based only, because they do not have to bribe anyone to come. So if your kid’s list is all ultra-selective, need-only schools and your income rules out need-based aid, then yes, you could be looking at close to full price, and that is worth knowing early.
That is not a reason to despair. It is a reason to build the list on purpose, so it includes schools that both fit your kid AND actually give merit, where your kid lands high enough in the pool to earn it. That balance is the entire game.
What this looks like in real numbers
Let me show you what strategic list-building actually surfaces, because I think the number makes it real.
Last year, my fourteen seniors were offered a combined $6.5 million in merit aid. Those are four-year totals, added up across every school that admitted them.
Now let me be completely honest with you about that number, because the honesty is the whole point. That is not $6.5 million that landed in fourteen bank accounts. A kid with six acceptances contributed six different offers, and nobody attends six colleges at once. So think of it less like a jackpot and more like a map: it is how much money was sitting on the table for kids who built their lists on purpose. Those were offers, not winnings, and every family still had to choose one school. But you do not get offers like that from a list thrown together by prestige and vibes. You get them from a list built so your kid is a high-value applicant at schools that pay to enroll high-value applicants.
Not one of those offers cared what those families earned.
So here is what to actually do
Stop disqualifying yourself. “We make too much” is an answer to a question about need-based aid, and it is the wrong question for merit.
Run the net price calculator on every school your kid is considering, because at a lot of merit-giving schools it will estimate merit too, and you will see a real number instead of the scary sticker price. Build the list so it includes schools where your kid is genuinely strong, not just the ones that impress the neighbors. And treat the sticker price as the starting bid, not the final cost, until a school actually tells you otherwise in writing.
Your income closes one door. Do not let it convince you the whole house is locked.
If you want help thinking through which schools would treat your kid like a catch, that is exactly the kind of thing I walk families through, and it starts with my free weekly newsletter, the calm next step in your inbox every week.
You are not behind, and you are not too rich to bother. You are right on time to do this the smart way.
