This is the question that as a parent I stressed about the most. For the purpose of this post, I am going to exclude discussing athletic scholarship money. I approached the question of financial aid without taking athletic money into consideration and I really feel it served us well. My goal was to find as much aid as possible and have the athletic money be icing on the cake.
My approach was to look at three different types of aid; federal loans/grants, scholarship money from the colleges, and outside scholarships.
First I'll share my experiences with federal loans/grants. I would recommend starting at www.studentaid.ed.gov which is the government website that talks about to complete FAFSA, Pell grants, and student loans programs. If you go the tools and resources link there is link called FAFSA4caster. This allows you to fill out some basic information long before the actual FAFSA is completed to give you an idea as to what type of aid you qualify for. In our case we found out that our income exceeded the limit to be Pell grant eligible. I anticipated that would be the case. However, as I will explain later the not being Pell grant eligible eliminated the ability to apply for some scholarships.
One more thought on federal aid. My son intends on becoming a teacher. As a result he qualified for an additional grant and may quality for a student loan forgiveness program. If you son has an idea as to what he wants to major in, it would be good idea to do some research to see if there any government programs offer grants or student loan forgiveness programs.
Scholarship money from the school was the biggest form of aid we received. Once you start looking at schools, pay special attention to the scholarships the school offers. In almost all cases visiting the school's website is the best place to go. In most cases they have link for prospective students. Some schools give detail with scholarship award levels and what is needed to qualify and maintain the scholarship. They all are based on GPA, ACT/SAT test scores and class rank. Many of the higher award amounts can include an interview process as well. I will share information about college entrance tests in a future post. Most schools offer additional money based on religious affiliation, parent's education level, specific area of study, and other criteria. In fact some of the schools we visited offered small grants if visited the campus before a certain date. examples were 500/yr, and one even had a 2000/yr. scholarship if we were an out of state resident who visited the campus before march of my son's senior year.
The last area I want to discuss is outside scholarship money. This is where the work comes in. We completed about 100-150 scholarship applications. We ended up receiving 3 outside scholarship totaling 2500/yr. A good place to start is your employer. In my case My employer had a scholarship program for children of employees that ranged from 1000-5000/yr. for 4 years. Another good lead is checking with your high school counselor. I made sure I began communicating with the high school counselor at the end of my son's sophomore year. I was very persistent in asking for any updates on scholarships and deadlines. My advice is to reach out to the counselor frequently now later than the beginning of your son's junior year. There are bunch of websites that allow you to search scholarships and links to apply. Some are better than others. One tip I recommend is creating an email address as I learned quickly that my inbox received a lot of spam regarding scholarship opportunities. Once I established an email account that I only provided to these websites, I was more likely to go take some time and go through the emails. I will speak more in this when I get to organizing developing a plan.
Going through the process, I learned that this was more work than I anticipated. I spent 10-20 hours a week searching for money to pay for college. It was also a chore getting my son to write essays and complete scholarship applications. We ended up with 6500/yr for 4 years. So it was definitely worth the effort.
My next post will discuss NCAA and NAIA entrance requirements that will also touch on college entrance exam tips.
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