Possible to leverage aid with an offer from lower-ranked school?

[HiteMikju]

I'm considering applying to a couple of schools ranked significantly lower than others I will likely be accepted to.  The only reason I'm considering it is that I thought that I might be able to leverage a large financial aid package from the lower-ranked schools to get more aid from the higher-ranked ones.  Is that realistic?  Can you only leverage aid from say, a school in the low 20's or mid 30's with an offer of admission or aid from a higher-ranked school?  If a school in the 50's gave me a full ride, would the higher-ranked schools feel any need to compete with that?  If not, I'd rather just save myself $100 or so on the applications since I'm not going to attend them.

[EarlCat]

As important as rankings are (like it or not), I doubt a 20's school will feel any pressure from a 50's school's scholarship offer.  Perhaps a 20's might feel pressure from another 20's.  Even that is doubtful because a lot of the scholarship determinations are based on budgetary constraints.

[wyatth]

^ what they said.
you will get scholarship offers, probably, but you cant use them as leverage for far better schools.

[IvyAnn]

I would imagine a T14 would say "OK, fine, so go there instead" if you tried this.