Both scholarship and grant are identified as gift aid, not requiring any repayment. Loan and employment, although not gift aid, are nevertheless considered student assistance and require that students meet eligibility criteria to receive them. Penn State also receives grant funding from over a dozen non-Pennsylvania state agencies on behalf of their resident students. When applying for federal assistance, as well as many state programs, a student must demonstrate financial need to qualify for funds. The computation of the submitted information is called the need analysis.
Institutional assistance is evaluated in two ways.
For Penn State scholarships, financial need is not necessarily the basis for selection. Primarily, a recipient is determined from an assessment based on academic merit. However, financial need is considered as a secondary element in approximately fifty percent of the awards. Other institutional programs mirror application requirements for the federal program regulations to provide consistency and to determine boundaries for the more limited funding situation. Institutional programs, however, allow latitude for exception, unlike most federally sponsored programs.