The offer on the table isn’t what you think it is
The four numbers you need before you can actually compare what you’ve been offered
Two offers arrived in the same week.
School A: 40% scholarship. School B: 25% scholarship.
Most families look at those numbers and move quickly. School A is the better offer. Done.
Except School A has a cost of attendance of $60,000. School B’s is $90,000.
School A’s 40% is worth $24,000 a year. School B’s 25% is worth $22,500. They’re almost identical — and once you factor in that School B has a stronger academic merit aid program your daughter qualifies for, School B might actually cost your family less out of pocket.
What cost of attendance actually means
Every school publishes a Cost of Attendance figure - the total estimated annual cost of being a student there, covering tuition, room and board, books, fees, and personal expenses.
This is the number an athletic scholarship percentage is calculated against, and it varies enormously. A mid-major public university might have a COA of $35,000. A private school in a major city could be $85,000 or more.
That gap matters more than almost anything else when you’re comparing offers.
A 50% offer at a $40,000 school is $20,000 a year. A 30% offer at an $80,000 school is $24,000. When families don’t convert percentages into dollars first, they make decisions based on a number that tells them almost nothing useful.
A higher scholarship dollar amount doesn't automatically mean a better deal. A 30% offer at an $80,000 school is more money than a 30% offer at a $40,000 school — but the family at the expensive school is still paying more out of pocket unless the rest of their package closes the gap.
That's why net cost is the only number worth comparing. Two families can receive identical scholarship percentages and end up in completely different financial situations depending on where they're going.
The psychology of the bigger number
There’s something else worth naming, even though nobody talks about it.
When a coach offers 40%, it feels like more. Not just financially - it feels like a stronger statement of belief. Like they want your daughter more. The family that receives 25% can know intellectually that the net cost works out better, and still feel like they’re somehow settling.
That feeling is real, and it’s worth acknowledging rather than pretending the math is enough to override it. Scholarship percentage has become a proxy for how much a program values your daughter as a player - and when families choose to think about it that way, higher is always better regardless of what the number actually represents in dollars.
The problem is that the percentage reflects two things simultaneously: how much a coach values you, and how much their budget is already committed elsewhere.
A coach at a top program competing for championships might offer 20% and mean it as genuine praise. A coach at a program that’s in a rebuild might offer the same player 70% because they would have higher on-field value to them.
Every coach thinks about scholarship differently, and adapts their recruiting strategy to suit; I plan to cover this in more detail in a future newsletter.
Either way, because you can’t know their philosophy, budget, or how they’re choosing to spend it across a class or a roster, the best bet is to pay attention to what the scholarship percentage number does tell you.
When converted to actual dollars and set against the full financial picture, it tells you what you’re going to pay. That’s the number that matters four years from now.