Merit Based Scholarships- Cut Down Your Student Loan Debt

Merit based scholarships are a great way to help pay for college expenses. It takes quite a lot of effort to play the merit based scholarship game well, but the rewards can be high. In particular, every dollar of scholarship money that is awarded will reduce the amount of student loans a person has to take out. Students should have as a goal to keep the amount of education loans they take out as low as possible and avoid them completely if they can. Student loans

can end up being very dangerous and prospective borrowers should educate themselves on the risks involved.

Merit Based Scholarships are Plentiful

There are literally thousands of merit based scholarships available, and they come in all shapes and sizes. Many of these do not even put much weight on a person’s grade point average other than having a minimum average in order to qualify for consideration. It is wise to start thinking about future scholarships as early as possible in high school or even before. If a person is already a college student or is heading into graduate school it is still not too late. There are quite a few internet data bases that one can search to identify different merit based scholarships, and these should be some of the first resources tapped. To find these I recommend a book entitled “How To Go To College Almost For Free” by Ben Kaplan, who won enough scholarship money to put himself through Harvard. He lists many other resources to search for available scholarships.

Start With Smaller Local Scholarships

Kaplan also suggests that students apply for as many merit based scholarships as they reasonably can (he applied for about three dozen in all), and that they start with some smaller scholarships that are either local or targeted to some particular group, like children of employees in a large company that is offering scholarships, for example. The reason for this is that once a person goes down the learning curve for doing scholarship applications, the process gets quicker and easier after a time. He says that if you apply for two scholarships you have already done 60% of the work for ten applications. In addition, applying for scholarships is quite similar to applying to colleges and universities for entrance, and so one’s college applications will look better and the student will have a much better chance of getting accepted to the college or university of choice.

Make Yourself Stand Out

Kaplan says that a person applying for merit based scholarships needs to learn how to make himself stand out from the crowd in the application process. These competitions almost always require a person to write some sort of essay. Telling a unique personal story that ties into the essay topic is one of the techniques that gets the attention of judges. Remember judges are probably going through a stack of several hundred applications, and many of them will look the same. Something unique and interesting which shows who that person is and what really motivates him or her can indicate to a judge that it is this particular student who is deserving of the merit based scholarship award.

Learning how to win merit based scholarships is an acquired skill and a lot of work, but the payoffs can be huge. And once again, it is advisable for people to take out as little student debt as possible.