When Your Child Should Start Applying for Scholarships

Parents and students are always surprised when I tell them that there are scholarships out there for students as young as 4 years old. Perhaps that surprises you as well!

It’s safe to say that most students don’t even think about applying for scholarships until the bill comes in the mail from whichever college or university they decide to attend.

While this is a great time to look for scholarships, the ideal time actually would have been earlier.

So when exactly should your child start applying for scholarships?

In this post, we are going to break down the ‘scholarship seasons’ and let you know exactly when your child should start looking for the big bucks for college.
General Scholarship Seasons

In The Scholarship System, we typically break up the year into 3 scholarship seasons: Fall, Spring and Summer.
Fall Season: August – December

This is the “kick-off” of scholarship season for the following school year. While you may be able to find a few late deadlines in August to receive money for that immediate fall semester, most deadlines will be for money for the following school year.

For example, if it is August 2017, then most scholarships will open for the following school year. So August 2017 applications would result in money for college for the 2018-2019 school year.

In our experience, major deadline months include October and December. Holiday break is perfect timing to wrap up final applications for the year.
Spring Season: January – May

The spring semester is really the “high season” of scholarships. There are millions of dollars up for grabs throughout these months. Deadlines seem to be evenly spread throughout January to May. Just know, this is prime scholarship time and your child should certainly be working on them during these months!

The end of winter break can be perfect for pinpointing your child wants to apply to. They may even be able to submit some applications early. Additionally, spring break is a great time to knock out many of these.
Summer Season: June – July

June and July are the “final stretch” months where everyone is rushing to find final dollars for the fall. We have recently found more and more scholarships with later deadlines, which is great news for students!

We actually started our own scholarship fund for our course members in summer 2016 and personally decided to have a late deadline. We know what it’s like to be in the last few months, scrambling for the final dollars, so we decided this would be most helpful.

The one challenge to summer months is your child won’t be the only one who may have procrastinated and is rushing to apply, which could mean more competition.

Still, if they are in need of some extra dollars for the fall, or if you are ahead of the game and your child is going to perhaps the following year or later, then do not ignore the process during June and July because there ARE scholarships out there with deadlines these months!

Now that we’ve gone over the “Scholarship Seasons,” let’s take a look at when your student should be focusing on scholarships based on their school year.

2. Encourage Students with Monetary Rewards for Applying

Monetary rewards are hard to beat if you want to motivate your child to apply for scholarships. Most don’t have a lot of cash, so giving them a little moolah for every completed application can encourage students to focus on their applications.

You don’t necessarily have to provide a lot of cash for every submission for this approach to be effective. Consider how long the average application takes and offer a dollar amount that is reasonable based on the effort required.

Even $5 may be enough to motivate your child to apply for scholarships more regularly. Just make sure that the amount you offer is affordable for you and is enticing to your student.
3. Connect Them with an Accountability Buddy

Sometimes peer pressure can work in your favor. In The Scholarship System, we provide students with a process for working with an accountability partner.

An accountability buddy is someone who almost functions as a partner in crime, though the goal is positive instead of risky.

If another person in your child’s class is also on the scholarship hunt, have them keep each other on target. They can have regular check-ins to monitor their progress and help each other find exciting opportunities.

It also gives them someone to bounce ideas off of who is in a similar position, which can be a great way to motivate your child and the other student to discuss their thoughts and form stronger essays as they apply for scholarships.

Ultimately, being accountable to someone other than a parent can be a big motivator. Most children don’t want to let their friends down, so, if they make a promise to someone in their social circle, they may be more likely to keep it.
4. Motivate Your Child with a Scholarship Party

In most cases, your child isn’t likely excited about the scholarship application process. However, if you create a fun event based on applying for scholarships, you might be able to build some momentum.

Consider coordinating with your child’s classmates and host a gettogether where they all come over and apply for scholarships. Have food and beverages available and a comfortable space for everyone to sit and work together.

The idea is to make applying for scholarships a social but productive activity. You can motivate your child and other students by providing refreshments while also keeping an eye on their progress. Every so often, host a “game break” and allow everyone to do something fun to recharge, ensuring that their stress levels stay low.

If you want to gamify the entire event, consider offering a reward, like a gift card to a restaurant, to the student who completes the most applications. A little friendly, low-stakes competition can keep everyone inspired. Or, you can provide them with a group incentive, like a trip to the movies once everyone submits a certain number of applications.

Even if you don’t want to do a big party, having a “Scholarship Sunday” with just the family can sometimes be enough. Grab some snacks and sit down around the table to knock out some applications!
5. Offer Them Cash Equal to Scholarship Awards

Another financial incentive that can encourage students to apply for scholarships is offering them a cash reward equal to the number of scholarship dollars they receive. In this scenario, you only provide them with money if they get a scholarship reward, which may motivate them to increase the quality of their applications.

The only risk of this approach is that it can add up fast. If your child really strives to land a lot of scholarship awards, you could be on the hook for thousands of dollars.

Make sure, if you motivate your child to apply for scholarships this way, that you have a suitable option for providing the incentive. While you could always back out of the deal, that would be a big breach of trust and could do long-term damage to your relationship.
6. Help Them Apply for Scholarships

One way to encourage students to apply for scholarships that doesn’t cost a dime is to help them during the process. You can perform scholarship searches, discuss essay topic ideas, assist them with organization, and be their cheerleader.

Sometimes, knowing they have support can have a significant impact on how your child perceives the scholarship process. Just make sure that you don’t cross from being helpful over to doing all of the work, as that usually doesn’t work out in the end.

If you want to know just how involved you should be while your child looks for scholarships, here is an article that discusses the topic in-depth: How Involved Should Parents Be in the Scholarship Process

8 Easy Ways to Motivate Your Child to Apply for Scholarships

When it comes to paying for college, scholarships are hard to be. The money doesn’t have to be repaid and opportunities are fairly plentiful, often being offered by states, companies, and a variety of philanthropic organizations.

While the idea of getting money from scholarships is often appealing, the actual process of applying usually isn’t. It takes a lot of hard work to apply for scholarships, so you need to encourage students if they aren’t inherently motivated to get it done.

Luckily, there are things you can do to inspire your child to be more active in the scholarship search. If you are looking for ways to motivate your child, here are eight easy ways to get started.

And if you are curious as to how we find scholarships, check out our free training on how to uncover legitimate scholarships, “6 Steps to Quickly Secure Scholarships for College.” This training is geared towards teaching parents what they need to know about paying for college so that you can help your child avoid student loan debt. To see when we are holding our next training, go to https://thescholarshipsystem.com/freewebinar.
1. Motivate Your Child with the Numbers

How to motivate Your Child to Apply for scholarshipsOne of the best places to start is to review some numbers to help motivate your child. For example, you can present them with a scenario to show them the impact of borrowing:

If your child lands $5,000 in scholarships for their freshman year, that means they can avoid $5,000 in student loans.

Over the course of a 10-year repayment, with an interest rate of 6 percent, they would end up paying $6,661 for that original $5,000. That’s $1,661 on top of the principal! And that only covers their freshman year.

If they have to take out an additional $5,000 for each of their remaining years, bringing their total amount borrowed to $20,000, then they’ll have to repay $26,645 over the course of 10 years at 6 percent interest. That’s $6,645 in interest!

In some cases, what motivates your child is tricky to figure out, but it’s hard to ignore numbers like that.

25 Scholarships to Apply to By the End of Spring Break

With spring break here, students have some extra time on their hands. While we certainly believe students should take this time to relax and catch up on some R&R, we also think it is a great time to knock out some applications for scholarships.

Here is a list of 25 scholarships to apply to before the end of Spring Break. Some deadlines are as late as April 30th. Either way, these next few weeks are major deadline weeks so you don’t want to miss out!

And if you are curious as to how we found these, check out our free training on how to uncover legitimate scholarships, “6 Steps to Quickly Secure Scholarships for College.” This training is geared towards teaching parents what they need to know about paying for college so that you can help your child avoid student loan debt. To see when we are holding our next training, go to https://thescholarshipsystem.com/freewebinar.
25 Scholarships to Apply to Before the End of Spring Break:

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Deadline: April 16th, 2017

Eligibility:

    Be enrolled at a college or university and planning to attend in 2017.
    Demonstrate Community service – this should be included in the essay.
    Have a cumulative GPA of 3.0 on undergraduate college course work.

GPA Requirement: 3.0

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Award: $1,500, $1,000, & $500

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    Provide copy of transcript.

GPA Requirement: No GPA Requirement

How to help your student avoid the student loan debt crisis?

If you have students in college, high school students or younger, or perhaps you are just DINKs (Dual  income no kids) right now but know that you will eventually have kids in college, I am sure you are wondering how in the world you can afford college for one kid, never mind multiple kids!

We keep hearing about this thing called the student loan debt crisis, basically a huge bubble waiting to burst that is filled with trillions of dollars of debt that graduates cannot afford to pay back.

Sounds scary, doesn’t it? If not, it should. This country is burying a generation in debt and making it impossible to truly realize the “American Dream” without paying a huge amount to loan and debt collectors each month.

So what can we do about this? How can we save our children, teenagers or current University students from being part of this massive student loan debt crisis?

The answer sounds simple, but we all know otherwise.

The answer is to find money in other places.

While this sounds great, most of you are probably thinking “Duh!! But where in the world can we get someone else to pay for our students’ education?”

This is especially frustrating if you are in the middle-income range where you have too much money for financial aid but not enough to actually pay for your kids to go to college.
Here are a few tips on how you can help your students find money for college in other places to help them avoid the student loan debt crisis.
1. Start some research for them.

For many students, starting the process is what derails them. They start creating logins, signing up on numerous scholarship portal websites, and are quickly overwhelmed. By perhaps combing through these hot spots for scholarships, finding just a few for them to apply for can get them in the right mindset and show them that scholarships applicable to them do exist!
2. Create a schedule.

Many scholarship deadlines are in the fall **yes, that’s coming QUICKLY! If they begin now and submit 1 scholarship application per week, they can have 19 applications submitted by the end of October (when many deadlines are). Even better, as students complete one scholarship after another, they will find many scholarships ask similar, if not the same, questions. Quickly, they will realize that they can simply tweak previous submissions and decrease their time per application exponentially.

If they don’t want to put in the time, perhaps some motivation will help. If they spend only 4 hours per week until the end of summer which is about 48 hours total (assuming 12 weeks of summer) and win a $2,000 scholarship (which I know they can easily do if they are putting in this amount of time!), they will earn $41.67 PER HOUR! I don’t care what they say, no part time job will pay them that well. Heck – most college graduates aren’t even making that within the first couple years of graduating!
3. Get them involved.

Scholarship committees like to see students being active. They do not necessarily have to be the president of every organization they are involved in but they do need to show that they weren’t just a couch potato.

Some great summer activities include volunteering, part-time jobs, summer camps, internships, shadowing potential careers, creating their own business – the list goes on. Honestly, as long as your student is learning and developing, it counts!
4. Reward them.

Rewards do not have to be cash but they could be any little ‘present’. Perhaps they get to stay out one hour later than usual or their boyfriend/girlfriend gets to stay an hour later or they get some extra video game time. It all depends on the ‘rules’ you have in place but I would say if stretching them incentivizes them, so be it!

However, cash is always king, especially in teenagers’ eyes. Paying $3-5 per each application (so in my earlier example, it would end up around $95 by the end of October) is not much compared to the hundreds or thousands of dollars in scholarship money.

Overall, as a parent, you can play a critical role in getting your student a free ride or at least some free money that can help reduce the bill. I promise -they will thank you when they see their friends paying hundreds of dollars every month towards their student loan.

Colleges That Meet 100% Financial Need without Student Loans

When college students need to cover the cost associated with getting their degree, many assume that student loans are always part of the financial aid package.

While many schools do include loans as a means of paying for their programs, there are also colleges that meet 100% financial need entirely loan-free.

This means your child can get their degree without student loans being part of the financial aid package. If your student is interested in exploring these options, here’s what you need to know.

TRYING TO HELP YOUR STUDENT GRADUATE DEBT-FREE FROM COLLEGE?

You’re in luck – we’re holding a LIVE training for parents TONIGHT (Sunday, August 5th) at 8PM ET on the complete Blueprint to a Debt-Free Degree. Click the image below to register or go to https://thescholarshipsystem.com/dfd-live-webinar to grab your spot. There will NOT be a replay.

Defining Financial Need

Financial need is the difference between the expected family contribution (EFC) calculation on your child’s FAFSA and the cost of tuition. The FAFSA takes information about your student’s and family’s financial situation and calculates what it deems is an affordable amount for your child to cover on their own.

Typically, the FAFSA reviews income, savings, specific investments, and similar financial factors to decide how much your student or family is expected to contribute to their education.

The exact amount of the EFC varies (at times dramatically) depending on your family’s unique circumstances. If your student has completed their FAFSA, the information on the assigned EFC is part of the result. If your child hasn’t finished the FAFSA, you can get an estimate using this handy calculator.

Your student’s financial need is determined by subtracting their EFC from the total cost of attending the school.

As an example, if your child’s EFC is $10,000, and the cost of tuition for a year is $30,000, that makes your student’s financial need $20,000.
How Colleges That Meet 100% Financial Need Work

At many schools, your child’s financial aid package will cover their remaining need through a combination of grants, scholarships, work-study options, and/or student loans, depending on their unique circumstances. However, with institutions that meet 100% financial need loan-free, student loans aren’t part of the package.

Instead, colleges that meet 100% financial aid without student loans only offer grants, scholarships, and work-study opportunities to cover the costs beyond your student’s EFC.

Using the example from above, this means your child’s financial aid package will be completely loan-free while still handling the $20,000 in financial need.

College without student loans

Now, this doesn’t mean your child can avoid loans entirely, depending on how they need to address the EFC amount. Colleges that meet 100% financial need have no control over the EFC (the remaining $10,000 from the example); that is entirely in your child’s or family’s hands.

Additionally, work-study is a common requirement in these programs. This means your student will be working part-time in exchange for the school covering their tuition. But, work-study can be a great opportunity, as most colleges strive to ensure that the work your student takes on it relevant to their future career, making it a powerful experience and resume builder.
What Motivates Colleges That Meet 100% Financial Need?

It isn’t uncommon to wonder why a school would want to ensure that students can cover their financial need without student loans. However, the colleges do have a big incentive to offer these programs.

First, it gives them the ability to attract the best and brightest students, regardless of their and their family’s financial situation. It makes high-cost schools more competitive in the eyes of lower-income students because their education will be seen as more affordable.

Second, schools that meet 100% financial need may have an easier time when it comes to crafting a diverse student body. Since they are prepared to help students cover the remaining costs beyond the EFC without loans, they can have “need-blind” admissions, eliminating financial considerations from the admissions process.

Colleges that meet 100% financial need can provide equal access to a high-quality education, bridging the gap between students that come from low- and high-income households.