<p>Tonight was senior awards night at D's high school. In addition to getting departmental and school-wide awards for in-school achievement, students were cited for outside scholarships and awards based on Guidance Dept. selections, as well as those they secured independently. One student was the recipient of 12 separate outside awards he secured independently from a wide variety of grantors (e.g, one from a large department store chain). I'm sure most in the audience were quite perplexed, as he is not one of the known academic stars. He is a B student with middling SAT's whose sole EC's were a club he founded that raised some money for charities and a summer internship that he got based on having founded the club. Because my D knows him, I know that his parents hired a college consultant a couple of years ago who initiated the club founding, found the internship, and scoured the planet for scholarships that he could apply for. He is a minority (adopted at birth into a non-minority family), and I'm sure one or more of the awards turned to some degree on his minority status. He is attending the state flagship, and with the 12 awards will be paying just a few thousand dollars a year. (No fin aid from the college--he wouldn't have qualified for a penny of need-based or merit aid.) He is an only child and the family is quite affluent--he has lacked for nothing in his life; their home is a showplace; they vacation all over the world, he attended expensive overnight camps for years. I'm sure the parents feel they have played the system quite brilliantly. I guess they have.</p>
<p>This all rubs me the wrong way. There are many students at our school with credentials equal to his and real financial needs who weren't advised to start a club just for their resumes, didn't have an internship discovered for them, and didn't know enough to dig up obscure scholarships. I doubt any of the grantors would be happy to know their cash went to someone who didn't need it and was getting 11 others. I hate the idea of expensive consultants hunting down scholarships that most kids aren't sophisticated enough to discover on their own, or to even think of looking for. (It's a very large high school with limited guidance time available to any one student). I want people who can very easily pay for their children's educations to do just that and leave the grants and awards to those not so fortunate. I'm just feeling very crabby about the fact that the system is so broken.</p>
<p>MommaJ, the same thing happened at my son’s school. One girl landed a bunch of scholarships and has her first year of college at a state university paid for. She was so worried that her friends would hate her for winning so much money. They didn’t, but one young man, who got nothing and ranks in the top 5 of the class, wonders why the money was not distributed a little better. This young man will be one of three kids in his family in college at the same time. But I can tell you that three of the top 10 grads received no local monies. All three are going to outstanding schools. All three had need. Oh well. No one said life is fair.</p>
<p>A similar thing happened at our school last year - one girl (who did end up being the val) got a bunch of outside awards. Most of them are for the first year only. I think it is great that she had to initiative to go out and apply for all of them, a lot of kids don’t bother. Many of these outside scholarships are not dependent solely on grades, but EC’s, recommendations, etc. I can’t fault the scholarship winner if other kids “didn’t know enough to dig up obscure scholarships”. A lot of that information is available on the internet.</p>
<p>The scholarships and rules are laid out there for everyone to see if they do the work to
1 - locate them
2- read the rules and selection criteria
3 - apply with their application focusing on the selection criteria. </p>
<p>None of them is given as a “right” or "“distribution”. You can’t sit back at the top of the class and figure money will flow to you. You have to go after it. Every year the GC sends notes out to encourage students to go to the career center to research and apply for scholarships. Few do the leg work necessary to actually land them. I congratulate those with the drive to do so. Those that are for merit, a major, community service, a particular socio-economic class, etc may have nothing at all to do with need. That’s what private scholarships do. They set their own rules. It is up to the students to find them, read the rules and understand them. If need is not one of the criteria, why should anyone sit back and not apply?</p>
<p>This also happened at my daughter’s school last year. The guidance counselor explained to me ( while we were attempting some of our own gabbling ) that a lot of the scholarships are the result of the parent’s involvement in the process.
Some of it was sort of who you know and what organizations your family belongs to. There was one girl, a decent student but not in the top ten who got all kinds of scholarships thrown at her…she didn’t even bother show up to receive them that night. Her daddy is influential in town and she was pretty accustomed to getting whatever she wants and not having to follow rules like everyone else. Once she was outside of her bubble and couldn’t hack it at her college. She withdrew after 2 weeks and attends cc now. What a waste of scholarship $$.
Also, I recall the salutatorian’s parents anger when their daughter received next to nothing compared to a lot of other students with lesser grades, etc. One student received an enormous scholarship because at the last minute decided to major in early childhood education, which put her in the running .</p>
<p>It surprises me that such an undeserving student should have been able to so successfully fool 12 separate scholarship committees. MommaJ, I strongly suspect that there is more to this student than you are aware of, even though your d is an acquaintance of his.</p>
<p>I see nothing wrong with scholarships being reserved for minority students - nor with individual scholarships being awarded on criteria other than financial need, such as choice of major, religious/ethnic background, EC interests, or hair color. It’s the founding entity’s right to establish the guidelines - it’s their money. </p>
<p>The only aspect of the OP’s situation that I find at all bothersome is the involvement of the high-priced consultant - but as long as the consultant stayed within ethical guidelines, I wouldn’t call foul because the kid applied for and received 12 different scholarships. Any other qualifying student could have applied, too - and today, scholarship information is readily available to anyone willing to spend the time and effort looking for it. This kid’s family apparently paid a consultant to do it for them, which is within their rights. But anyone could have scouted these scholarships out. If the OP’s high school doesn’t assist students/parents in this area, I might complain about that.</p>
<p>Personally, I applaud the kid who applied for these scholarships, even if someone else did some of the leg work in finding them. After all, what generally separates a successful business from an unsuccessful one? Someone scrambled a bit harder. As Steve Jobs learned, building a better mousetrap isn’t enough; the world won’t come knocking at your door. You have to go out and make it happen. This kid did.</p>
<p>The only aspect I find troubling is the school’s announcement of all of this. Unless the school is somehow involved in giving out the scholarships, it’s no one else’s business.</p>
<p>Our school has two annual “awards” ceremonies. One is for recognition of outstanding seniors and other students as selected by departments, the other is for announcing scholarships. I have never understood how they obtain the information for the scholarships presentation as my D was not recognized yet many other students were. Additionally, there are scholarships that have no obvious application process yet are awarded based solely on guidance/school administration recommendation. I have to think that personal bias plays a bit into this. Thankfully we did not need to rely on scholarships where students are selected by the school. It can be frustrating and disappointing but life isn’t fair.</p>
<p>Yeah, I don’t see a problem here. The grantors of these scholarships apparently don’t care if a student gets other scholarships, otherwise they could have just prohibited awardees from taking other scholarships, or taking more than a certain number or dollar amount of other scholarships. They apparently don’t care about financial need, or they would have made it a criterion. You might not think this particular student has much merit, but he was obviously what the particular grantors happened to be looking for.</p>
<p>Other students could have gone out and applied for scholarships too. I applaud this one for not being complacent about finances just because his parents have money. This way he will have more financial independence (which I think is generally good for the parent/college-age child relationship), and he will be protected if something catastrophic happens regarding his parents’ money. Would that I had had that much sense when I was applying to college - I listened to people who told me not to bother applying for scholarships because my parents had the ability to pay, and it turned out to be my one true regret from the college admissions process.</p>
<p>This is precisely why I think it’s tacky and invasive to have such “awards” nights. Schools should recognize sincere scholarship, as opposed to how that translates into dollars. Tacky, indeed.</p>
<p>If some kid games the system by hiring a professional scholarship tracker, do I really need that shoved in my face?</p>
<p>And if the scholarships are legit, and received in an honorable fashion, I can ask the same question — do I really need it shoved in my face?</p>
<p>We live in a nice, upper-middle class neighborhood, many of the parents make nice salaries. In all the years I’ve lived here, I can’t remember one time the mayor of my town had all us parents march up to a podium in Town Hall to announce our latest raises and bonuses. High school “awards” nights are no different.</p>
<p>When a student is applying for scholarships, they have no idea if they will be the one to receive it, hence a student may apply for many in the hopes they will receive at least one. Therefore, you can’t criticize them for “gobbling.” And once they win, realistically, who is going to turn down a scholarship because they got too many?</p>
<p>Second, the reason high schools announce scholarship winners is because the organization that awards the scholarship often contacts the school and asks them to publicly acknowledge the winners. I know this because that was the case when my child won a few scholarships. She applied for the scholarships outside of school and didn’t really want it mentioned at her senior awards ceremony because she was already receiving other awards from her school and didn’t want her classmates to “hate” her.</p>
<p>I understand that organizations want winners publicly recognized. What I don’t understand is why scholarship winner 1 from University X is recognized yet scholarship winner 2 from University X isn’t- and they’re basically equivalent awards in terms of dollars and perceived prestige. </p>
<p>At our school, if your child is being recognized by the faculty for scholarship/achievement/contributions from the department, you’re invited to the ceremony. Come or not, it’s up to you. If you’re in the audience, you’re getting something. Scholarships are a schoolwide assembly- no escaping that. 4 students compete for a cash award (to use as they please) from our local paper- they know they’ve been nominated, interviewed, etc.; winner’s announced in front of the entire student body. I’d hate to have to be a gracious loser in that environment.</p>
<p>I’m impressed this kid found so many scholarships that did not have a financial need component. When my daughter was looking for scholarships, that requirement put her out of the running for the vast majority of awards.</p>
<p>Our HS distributes a lot of scholarship award information to the students. Students have to apply – and I have been surprised by how few students do this. So at graduation there are some students who get a ton of awards and some that get one or none – but that might be because they didn’t apply. One issue is that the school doesn’t advertise how much these scholarships are for. My daughter applied, and got a few – she almost fell off the podium during graduation when she opened the envelope and saw the amount. </p>
<p>One of the awards our school gives is to someone described as an “unsung hero.” They usually do a good job picking students who are not the favorites, not the ones who get everything. In fact, graduation was one of the few events in 12 years where the awards were based on who applied or pure merit (the highest math and science grades, for example), as opposed to 11 years of assemblies of watching the same teacher favorites get all the honors.</p>
<p>At our school the few students who win multiple scholarships are the ones who went through the trouble of applying for them. More power to them.</p>
<p>My Ds were/are sal and val, respectively, in their respective years, but each won only a few awards on senior recognition night. Because after the drudgery of filling out all the apps to the high-end colleges they aspired to they were sick of the whole thing. So we just gratefully accepted whatever honors our daughters were given and applauded the kids who “gobbled” up most of the local scholarships.</p>
<p>My kids found the effort of applying for these local scholarships exhausting. Essay, more recommendations, often an interview with a committee (do the local realtors association really care about this stuff? Apparently!), plus if you win, showing up for some spring luncheon, writing thank you notes to all the committee members, etc.</p>
<p>I think you sell this kid short. If financial need was not part of the criteria, and he went to the effort of jumping through all these hoops, more power to him.</p>
<p>Sophomore year my kid got a letter from an organization which had awarded him a scholarshp the previous year to say that nobody had applied this year- and if he sent a note from the registrar to prove that he was still enrolled, they’d send him the money again.</p>
<p>Nice, very nice. Made my kid happy that when I’d suggested thank you notes ( a relic from the dark ages, apparently) he’d taken me seriously and written them. Old people like me remember things like this- so if you figure 3 minutes per note, for 5 committee people-- and a “free” 1K sophomore year- probably the highest paying job he’ll ever have!!!</p>
<p>Seriously, applying for these things is beyond tedious. So I think the kid in your town should be applauded. And why is his race germane to this story?</p>
<p>So if I understand the Op correctly, the student who’s parents helped get him involved early, used careful planning, got out and got the word out that he was seeking scholarship actually did obtain quite a number of scholarships.
There is a lesson to be learned there.</p>
<p>Many scholarships available in our area are only given to students attending an in-state school. There are generally a few students who get lots of those.</p>
<p>"The scholarships and rules are laid out there for everyone to see if they do the work to
1 - locate them
2- read the rules and selection criteria
3 - apply with their application focusing on the selection criteria. </p>
<p>None of them is given as a “right” or ““distribution”. You can’t sit back at the top of the class and figure money will flow to you.”</p>
<p>I agree. The scholarships are available for anyone to find – if the person bothers to find them – something that anyone can do on their own – and if the person bothers to take the time and effort to do the scholarship applications and submit them on time. </p>
<p>As a parent, what has frustrated me is that my younger S – who could qualify for many scholarships – refuses to make the effort to apply. </p>
<p>I’ve been on scholarship committees – including national ones. Most students who qualify for scholarships don’t bother to apply. Most of the students who do apply don’t bother to do thoughtful applications. Anyone who applies – and does basics like has someone proof read their application, and makes sure that their applicationis submitted on time – is at an advantage.</p>
<p>As for the “scholarship gobblers” – more power to them!</p>