Grants and scholarships basics
To manage budgets and assign financial aid to eligible candidates, you can use the Grants and scholarships view in DreamApply.
DreamApply does not serve as a financial platform for handling actual payments. Instead, it should be used as a planning and allocation tool. It helps institutions understand how funds can be potentially distributed to candidates, forecast expenses and prepare structured data for use in external budgeting or payment platforms.
Budgets
A budget represents a specific amount of institutional funds allocated for a particular purpose. For example, an institution can define the Top Achievers budget for high-performing candidates or the International Students Support budget to offer financial aid to applicants from abroad.
Each budget is associated with a budget year that corresponds to the institution’s financial year. A single budget can support one or more grants and scholarships that draw from its total amount. DreamApply allows institutions to create overdrawn budgets to model scenarios where the actually allocated amount exceeds the initially allocated funds.
Grants and scholarships
DreamApply allows setting up two types of financial aid:
- Grants
- Scholarships
A grant or scholarship defines how funds from a linked budget are distributed across specific months within a budget year. Once set up, it can be assigned to candidates who meet predefined criteria. Administrators can award candidates in the following ways:
- Manually: Assign grants and scholarships to individual applicants.
- Auto-selection tool: Use the built-in bulk award tool to let the system automatically identify top candidates.
How bulk awarding works
The Grants and scholarships view comes with the Bulk award tool that simplifies financial aid allocation. To run the tool, Administrators select an academic term, the types of offers they want to consider and, optionally, specify additional criteria using flags.
To identify eligible candidates, the Bulk award tool evaluates offers of the selected types ordered according to their current ranking scores. It processes offers one by one, starting from the top of the ranking list. For each offer, the system performs the following checks:
Grant or scholarship status: If an applicant parent to the offer has already been assigned the grant or scholarship, the offer is excluded from evaluation.
Offer decline status: If an applicant has declined the offer, the offer is excluded from evaluation.
Offer ranking: If an applicant has not received all required scores and their ranking has not been calculated, the offer is excluded from evaluation.
Amount calculation: The system verifies if it has sufficient information to determine the potential grant or scholarship amount for the applicant.
Check for multiple offers: If an applicant has multiple eligible offers within the same academic term, DreamApply displays a warning. Such offers are not excluded from processing; the system evaluates and includes them in the results list. This step helps ensure more applicants receive the grant or scholarship.
The steps above are performed for each offer in the ranking list. Once all offers have been evaluated, DreamApply presents a summary of the results, allowing Administrators to proceed and assign the grant or scholarship.