I always ask tell my friends I have no idea how I’m going to pay for college and they always say but there are scholarships. Honestly, what are even the chances that you’ll be the one to win and some of the scholarships don’t even give that much. Plus, you still have to pay for food and supplies. Please feel free to chip in your thoughts.
There are different kinds of help you can get depending on you and your financial need and you and your academic profile. And which colleges you apply to. So instead of speaking in general, let’s speak about you.
Are you a Jr?
GPA?
Test scores?
State?
low income, middle income upper income any estimate?
About 60 colleges claim to meet 100% of demonstrated need. A number of others claim to meet more than 90%.
We can debate whether they all live up to their claims. The grant aid offered by these schools to any given student might vary by thousands of dollars. However, the average grants are not token amounts. For example, the average need-based scholarship and grant award at Holy Cross is nearly $34K/year. At Amherst, the average need-based scholarship/grant award is over $48K/year. More than 57% of Amherst students (1100 of 1907 full-time undergrads) were awarded need-based scholarships/grants for 2014-15, according to Amherst’s Common Data Set.
That’s Amherst (one of the most selective schools in America). Less selective, less well-endowed schools do tend to be less generous with need-based aid. However, they also tend to have lower sticker prices (and in some cases offer merit scholarships, which Amherst does not.)
The best scholarships are provided by the colleges themselves. All the scholarship contests are either a crap shoot or a waste of time. Most of those scholarships will only apply to one year which doesn’t really help.
And there are merit scholarships. Are you NMSF? What can you pay?
In some rare instances, there are scholarships that cover room and board as well as tuition (known as full-ride), so food is not an issue. If you have no idea how you will pay for college, then now is the time to sit down and make some honest assessments. First, discuss with your parents how much - if anything - they will be able to provide towards your education. Then go to some schools that appeal to you and plug your family’s financial numbers into their net price calculators to get a feel for what schools would expect from you.
If you are seeing big gaps in the numbers, then you need to think about how to find an affordable school. What are your in-state options? Is there a school nearby so you could live at home and commute? What are your statistics - are they such that you might be eligible for merit money? Realize to get a merit scholarship you need to be in the top 10-15% of students at a given school, so a “dream school” that is a stretch based on your stats likely won’t offer you merit money, but might offer you need-based aid dependent on your family finances. Many lesser-known private schools are willing to give significant merit aid to top students - don’t look just at the sticker price of a school, look at the average net price paid by students and how much merit aid is available.
There are several threads in the financial aid forum listing schools that offer merit scholarships - some are guaranteed based on certain GPA and test score, others are competitive. Spend some time looking through those and see if there’s anything that might work for you.