Scholarships- Should You Apply?

In a word, yes, you should apply for scholarships. The cost of financing higher education continues to grow even faster than it has in the past. College tuition and other related costs have grown at about twice the rate of inflation for 30 years now, and anyone listening to the news these days hears about even larger increases lately as budget-strapped states cut funding to institutions of higher learning.

It is for this reason that so many students end up starting their working lives with large amount of student debt. One way to avoid this debt is to offset college costs with scholarships. There are thousands of different scholarships available to students, so many that you will have to research a handful of different data bases to begin to get your arms around the possibilities.

When my children went to college I made the mistake of thinking that I earned too much money for my children to be eligible for any scholarships, not that I earned all that much. I was pleased to find out that my son, who majored in music, got a small amount of scholarship money from his music department almost immediately. Had I realized that there were many other scholarships available for music students, we would have pursued those and saved a good deal of money. I was able to put both my kids through undergraduate school without them having to take out student loans, and I was pleased to do that. I just didn’t want my kids to start out in life bearing a huge debt burden. In fact they both went on with further studies and took out student loans, and that is more than enough debt for them to bear.

There are many merit based scholarships available that do not even consider a person’s income. And you don’t have to be the captain of the football team or have a 4.0 grade point average and near-perfect SAT scores to win some of these. So the first hurdle to overcome is the one that has “I won’t qualify for any scholarships” written on it.

The second thing to realize is that you or your student should apply for as many scholarships as possible. This will take a major effort on several fronts, the first one being to do research and find the right scholarships to apply for. It is best to go after smaller local scholarships, or scholarships that are designed for particular groups, such as left-handed people (yes, there actually are scholarships for only southpaws). Even if the payoff is less than the large national scholarships, every little bit counts, and the experience will help with the larger applications later. It has been said that if you complete two applications and file them, you have already done 60% of the work needed to complete ten applications. So plan on applying for a lot of them- as many as you possible can.

Student debt is already a major problem in the U.S., and it will continue to fester in the coming years. Many people take out way too much student debt and are overwhelmed by it. One way to combat this is through merit scholarships, and as referred to above, these come in all shapes and sizes. A lot of these scholarship awards are portable, which means that they can be used at any institution of higher learning. And the benefits derived from these scholarships are worth more than they appear on the surface. If a student wins a scholarship for $10,000, for example, you will not have to pay interest on a student loan for that amount. If your loan repayment plan was for 15 years, for example, even on a federally backed student loan with a decent interest rate, you will probably end up paying almost $20,000 in total due to the accumulating interest charges. So unless you are rich and can pay cash for college, which these days can cost up to $100,000 even for state schools, your mindset and that of your student should be to launch a campaign to win merit scholarships early on. In fact it is best to plan for this while the student is early in his or her high school years. The best place to start is the book: “How To Go To College Almost For Free” by Ben Kaplan who financed his Harvard education with merit scholarships.