How Parents Can Help Win Merit Scholarships

Sending a child to college these days involves big money. The average cost to attend a state school is up to $20,000 per year, and that jumps to $50,000 per year for private schools. On top of that many states are substantially raising tuition fees due to the poor economy and the fact that the finances of many states are in dire straits. For example, California just announced college tuition increases of about 30% at state

schools. One way to offset these enormous costs is to go after and win merit scholarships, and there are thousands of those available each year. Applying for merit scholarships is one thing, but winning them is another, and succeeding with the latter is quite difficult. So what can parents of college bound students do to help their children and themselves when it comes to winning merit scholarships?

First of all, parents generally know that college is going to cost a lot of money. They probably don’t know much about merit scholarships and how to go about winning them, however. So the first thing they need to do is learn about the “scholarship game” and how to play that game to win. Perhaps the best way to get started is to read the book “How To Go To College Almost For Free” by Ben Kaplan. The author tells the story of how he won $90,000 in scholarships and financed his Harvard education. He breaks his effort down into a science, and shows you how to proceed. He also makes numerous references to his parents and the help and support he received from them. Please understand that Ben Kaplan is a rather extraordinary individual, and in fact he is now known as the “Scholarship Coach” and he has made a career out of helping people win college scholarships. He writes books, goes on a national tour each year, and maintains a web site that offers lots of resources to help people finance college. He suggests parents can offer substantial help to their students in many ways.

Early on they should sit down with their college bound children and explain to them what attending college is likely to cost and the impact of that on the finances of the family. This should ideally be done early in high school, preferably freshman year. One thing that is clear in Kaplan’s approach is that he knew very early on what he had to do. He got himself into various clubs and leadership positions in school which made him stand out when he applied for scholarships and applied to colleges.

Parents can also help by providing research assistance to their children in several ways. A lot of research is necessary to simply identify merit scholarships that are available and appropriate for a particular child, and this is more than just a few simple internet searches. Also, almost all scholarships require some kind of essay or writing requirement, so parents can help with research for those writing samples. Of course parents should not and cannot write the essay for their child, but they can definitely help with research and can and should proofread the essay and the entire application submission.

Kaplan talks at length about how the student needs to “paint a picture” of himself or herself. Parents can definitely help their students with that, as accurate self-evaluation is very difficult at any time in life, much less in teenage years. Another thing parents can do is to help keep things organized, as the student might be dealing with two dozen or more scholarship applications (Kaplan applied for about three dozen), and it is easy to mix up paperwork, application deadline dates, etc. Parents can also be a good sounding board and provide positive feedback. They should be supportive and let their student know that if he or she fails to win a particular scholarship, then that is not a statement about the student’s personal worth. There is a lot of subjectivity in awarding scholarships, and the thing to do is simply not to take a negative result personally and to move on to the next scholarship application.

Parents can help their children and help themselves by learning about college scholarships and how to win them. Kaplan says that there is a learning curve involved with applying for scholarships and the process gets easier after one builds experience. There is no doubt that with the help of supportive parents this learning curve toward winning merit scholarships will be faster and easier to surmount.