Yvette Hernandez started applying for college scholarships when she was still a junior in high school — 50 in all, by the time she was done — because she knew her family could not afford to pay for her tuition, room, board and other expenses without them.

Most scholarship applications demanded an essay, a personal statement, a resumé, references, an interview, letters of recommendation and good grades, which Hernandez kept up even while also juggling college admission applications.

In the end, she won 10 outside private scholarships, adding up to more than $10,000. That meant she could accept an invitation to the University of California, Berkeley, which had offered her a generous amount of financial aid.

Then, when she told the university about these other gifts she’d earned, something mysterious happened: The aid that Berkeley had agreed to give her was suddenly reduced.

“Your financial aid has been revised,” an email from the university informed her, just before the fall semester bill was due.

Hernandez had experienced the gut punch that advocates for families and students call “the August surprise.”

That’s typically the month when universities substitute outside scholarships for already-promised institutional financial aid, resulting in a zero net gain for recipients and leaving them scrambling to cover balances they didn’t think they’d have to pay — often without even telling them the reason.

“They just let me figure out why. That’s the most annoying part. It was an automatic email, I assume,” Hernandez said.

Having less money meant she had to live at home and take classes online for an additional semester after the campus reopened from its Covid-19 shutdown. When she returned, she made extra cash by, among other things, working in a basic-needs center for other low-income students, who, she learned, are disproportionately subjected to so-called scholarship displacement.

“We all felt the same anger,” said Hernandez, who is now entering her senior year. “All the work we did for these scholarships, just to have the university say, ‘Well, okay, we guess you don’t need as much from us.’ ”

Read the full article about college scholarship displacement by Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report.