<prompt> Human: Hello all,Im in a confusing situation. My wife is in school, and wants to apply for scholarships but they all require demonstrated need via a FAFSA on file. I make enough money albeit by working incessantly that we can pay for it in cash with no loans but she would absolutely earn merit based scholarships if not for this little wrinkle about the FAFSA.She has straight As and there does not appear to be any straight up merit based scholarships offered by her school VCU if anyones familiar that dont carry this FAFSA requirement.When I fill out FAFSA calculators, it shows our expected financial contribution to be between 70-80K.It would seem to me that its clearly saying she has no financial need whatsoever. Am I misunderstanding something? If she applies for a scholarship that aims for high achievers with the stipulation that there needs to be a FAFSA-proven financial need, are people going to look at her application and scoff?As a side note, the FAFSA thing also says she could get somewhere in the order of 12K in Federal Stafford loans, which we dont really need per se, but if we took them would that be some kind of proof that we have financial need?tl;dr: wife is kicking ass in school and we have decent income, she wants a merit based scholarship but everything wants a demonstrated financial need. Are we SOL? Bother filling out the FAFSA?thank you all  <response>: If the scholarship requires a FAFSA showing demonstrated need, she cant get that scholarship. Fair or not, most scholarships want to help people who need the help. Most pure merit based scholarships are given out to high school students, or to attract top-performing students to the university in the first place. Once shes at VCU, they have no incentive to give her a discount because shes a good student - they already have her test scoresgrades locked up. 