How do outside scholarships affect my aid?

Outside scholarships, in most cases, reduce your least advantageous aid first — loans or work-study — rather than your gift aid. You must report them to Earlham.

Earlham· Scholarship Stacking

Stacking Outside Scholarships at Earlham

How Earlham treats outside scholarships when they arrive on top of institutional merit aid.

Verified Jun 2026today· COWORK

The verdict

Loan-first displacement

At Earlham, an outside scholarship reduces loan offers before touching institutional grants. The strategy follows from that: every $1 in outside scholarship is effectively $1 less in graduation debt.

earlham.edu publishes the $73,526 cost-of-attendance worksheet the math is run against.

Stacking policy at Earlham

You must notify Earlham of any outside scholarships. Outside scholarships will, in most cases, reduce your least advantageous aid (loans or work-study) first. For INspire Earlham recipients, additional scholarships cannot exceed full tuition.

Outside scholarships reduce loans/work-study before gift aid; INspire recipients are capped at full tuition for total institutional funding.

Source: https://earlham.edu/cost-affordability/types-of-aid/scholarships/

Stacking questions families ask

How do outside scholarships affect my aid?: Outside scholarships, in most cases, reduce your least advantageous aid first — loans or work-study — rather than your gift aid. You must report them to Earlham.

Rules that bite at Earlham

The trip wires we'd flag in a custom playbook. Each is derived from Earlham's own published policy, not generic advice.

renewalMerit Scholarships (core, achievement-based): renewal floor that quietly knocks awards out
Renewable for four years; renewal requires a 2.0 cumulative GPA and full-time enrollment. A single rough term can end a four-year award here without warning if the GPA floor isn't met cumulatively.

Aid-office script (copy & send)

A binding written answer beats a verbal hallway promise. This script is keyed to Earlham's published displacement type. Paste it, fill in your name, and send it before you accept an outside award.

Subject: Outside-scholarship treatment question, fall applicant

Dear Earlham Financial Aid Office,

I'm a fall applicant reviewing how outside scholarships interact with my institutional aid package. I've read the public policy at https://earlham.edu/cost-affordability/types-of-aid/scholarships/ and the $73,526 cost-of-attendance worksheet.

If I win a $5,000 outside scholarship after the package is built, can you confirm it reduces my Direct Loan offer first, before any institutional grant is touched?

If the loan offer is smaller than the outside award, what is the next aid type that gets reduced (work-study, institutional grant, other)?

A written answer (email is fine) is important because the outside-scholarship awarding bodies want confirmation before disbursing. Thank you for the time.

— [Student name], [Application ID if available]

How Earlham compares across our verified dataset

68 of 272 verified schools in our dataset use loan-first displacement.
Earlham is in a recognizable cluster (68 schools share this category). That framing matters when comparing peer schools that may publish the policy differently or not at all.
247 of 272 verified schools publish at least one four-year renewable merit award.
Earlham is one of them. The cohort minority (25 schools) only awards one-year scholarships, which means the four-year value families assume on a brochure quote isn't guaranteed at every school.

Sources used on this page

Every claim is checked against Earlham’s own published materials. Below is the full reference set.