Suggestions for Scholarships or Scholarship Websites

Paying for College
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Hello,

First of all, I hope this is the right forum to post this and I will try to be as brief as possible…

So, I am currently a high school senior and recently I have started to realize how much college will cost me. I knew college is exceedingly expensive, but I thought that due to the quality of my application (35 ACT, 4.0 GPA, numerous EC’s, awards, etc.) and my family’s financial situation (not poor by any definition, but not well-off either) that I would have at least one school that would be very cheap when everything was all said and done. Sadly, it does not appear this way.

I applied to 10 schools and am currently 6/6 for acceptance letters. For three of my schools, I was offered the max in merit aid that the school gives, or at least without a separate application. For one of these (Ohio State, and I am an Ohio resident), I applied for a full ride scholarship, but it seems very unlikely because it is a very competitive program. For the other two, one I am not aware of other merit opportunities and the other I missed the deadlines and am not interested in the school anyway. Despite receiving these max offers, I still have to pay more than half of the total COA. Of course, I still need my FA package and outside scholarships, but as is, OSU, a public, in-state university, will still cost me $19,000 PER YEAR, and the other two, because they are private institutions, are still $25-$30,000+ per year.

As for the other three schools, one gave me a weak offer, including need-based aid (CWRU, though I applied for some larger scholarships there, too), one is currently comparable in cost to OSU despite not receiving maximum merit aid (Miami of Ohio), and one I will not know until March/April (Notre Dame).

My mom recently filed the FAFSA, and her EFC was about $10,000. She will struggle to afford this, and this does not include my dad’s income, etc. (my parents are divorced). For five of my schools (only accepted into one right now, Notre Dame) they match 100% of demonstrated need, but $15,000+ (with my dad’s information) per year still seems like a LOT of money…(On a side note, can I take a student loan to pay for my parents EFC if they cannot/do not want to pay it?)

So, while I have been searching and applying for outside scholarships for months, their importance and necessity seems to be getting greater by the day. I have applied to numerous ones, but have been disappointed by all but one decision that I have received (I am currently on the state level for Elk’s MVS!). I have been using Fastweb as well as applying to local scholarships (which I know are more likely for me to receive), but I would like other options. So, here is the main reason for this post:

Does anyone know of any large or otherwise worthwhile (such as few applicants) scholarships with deadlines that have not passed OR scholarship websites (not including Fastweb) that are helpful? Because many scholarships have restrictions, I am a white male interested in STEM.

Thank you for your time. Hopefully I did not ramble too much and feel free to tell me if my worrying is unwarranted; college costs have been stressing me out recently and I needed to focus my thoughts. Thanks again!

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Do those schools that meet full need on your list require the Profile and the Non-custodial parent Profile? If so…have they been completed? And if yes, your dad’s income and assets will be considered. If he is remarried, his spouses incime and assets will be considered as well.

You have excellent stats. Did you apply to any schools with guaranteed merit awards for your GPA and ACT scores?

For those schools that meet full need…they will calculate your family comtribution. Don’t be surprised if it is higher than your FAFSA EFC. It might be. Your family will be expected to pay that amount. The schools won’t give you aid to cover your family contribution (unless you are getting significant merit aid).

The very best scholarships and financial aid awards come from the colleges. At this point, you will just have to wait and see how the money part plays out.

I do hope you have a financial safety school in your mix. As a Ohio resident, there are schools like Kent and Bowlong Green where you likely would have received significant merit aid…and your costs to attend would be modest.

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On a side note, can I take a student loan to pay for my parents EFC if they cannot/do not want to pay it?)


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Not really.

. And your aid pkg will likely already include a student loan that will be going towards “need”…so you can’t take one to cover EFC.

As a frosh, you can only borrow $5,500…and unless you’re going to a “no-loan” school, your aid pkg will already have that loan in it.

How much can mom pay?

How much can dad pay?

Are you a NMF?

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I think you should apply to some schools that will still award you very large merit awards for your stats…It sounds like you need at LEAST full tuition, if not more.

Maybe UAH?

What about Temple? Has their deadline passed for merit?

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@thumper1 All 5 of my 100% need-matched schools require the CSS profile and 4/5 of my schools require both the CSS profile and the NCP, and they both have been completed. Yes, I applied to a few schools that have guaranteed merit aid for my stats, and I received it, but it seems like it will not be enough.

@mom2collegekids‌ Thanks for the info on student loan and EFC, that is something my parents and I have been wondering for awhile. Not sure how much either parent can pay, and not sure if either are willing to contribute that full amount, either. I am not a NMF. Also, out of my 5 schools that will match my demonstrated need, only one includes loans in its package (sadly, it’s the school I want to attend: Notre Dame).

As for applying to other schools, it’s not something I am really interested in doing, and I know my parents do not want me to apply to anymore schools. either. However, any other schools that I would apply to would almost certainly be in Ohio. I figure I should get close to if not a complete full ride at Ohio University and a college in my hometown, but I am not really interested in attending either institution.
Edit: Also not really sure if I have missed deadlines for these other schools or not. Ultimately, I would like to avoid applying to other schools; instead, I would like to try to find private scholarships to help pay for the schools to which I did apply.

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I hope Notre Dame comes through for you, or that one of the remaining 4 gives you a full ride (or close to it).

If you really are not interested in applying to any other schools such as Ohio University, or UAH, then you need to start considering the possibility of a “gap year.” Normally, I do not like this approach but in your case it could be financially worthwhile. With your ACT and GPA, you should be capable of getting a full ride, or near full ride, somewhere decent.

The “gap year” would allow you to recalibrate your goals and to target schools with more generous aid packages. It will not help you get more aid from these same schools.

However, I think that not looking seriously at OU or UAH is potentially a mistake. UAH is actually an excellent STEM school with serious students in a very nice town. I know because it is my hometown, Huntsville. My sister graduated from UAH and is now a doctor and a professor at a medical school. You probably could get your cost of attendance down to about $10,000. I think you should at least look at this webpage:
http://www.uah.edu/admissions/undergraduate/financial-aid/scholarships
and this one too:
http://www.uah.edu/admissions/undergraduate/financial-aid/costs

If you are open to applying to some other schools, you need to start soon. All kinds of deadlines are closed, and others are closing – both for the colleges themselves and for scholarships. You are in a tough spot.

For what it is worth, I love Notre Dame too. It might be worth $20,000 or so in loans per year. That’s up to you and your family. I do not believe that OSU is worth the additional $10,000 per year of debt, compared to UAH. I live in Columbus now, so I know both of those schools pretty well.

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I’m a Ohio Universoty alum. It’s not a bad place, and if affordable might be a good option. But I’m not sure about their application deadlones, especially for scholarship consideration.

At this point, you need to have a very serious talk with your parents about college costs. You need to know how much they will pay for you each year. That is the budget you have. Hopefully, one of your schools will come in meeting the budget your parents set. Otherwise…they will not be affordable.

So…make sure there is something truly affordable on your list…just in case adequate money is not forthcoming from your other schools.

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love Notre Dame too. It might be worth $20,000 or so in loans per year.

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Absolutely not if the student will have to pay them, which it sounds like the plan would be. And since ND also puts loan in the FA pkgs, there would be an additional $30k in debt.

The student should not have to pay back more than $40k total…and that’s quite high.

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@NROTCgrad‌ I looked at those webpages. I am not saying UAH is a bad school, but I would have trouble convincing my parents to allow me to apply to a school I nor they had ever heard of previously. OU is most likely, followed by my hometown college, should I apply to another school. Regardless, I will need to talk to my parents not only about if I should apply elsewhere, but also how much they are able to contribute so that I can get a better idea of what’s affordable. Hopefully it’s not too little, too late…My parents would not allow me to do a gap year, so that is not an option, nor is it something I would like to consider; I want to be on a college campus next fall. Because deadlines are passing like crazy, I need to get this all figured out ASAP.

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OP, with your stats, what is the net price for Miami after the scholarship?

Is your dad’s income high? You may fare better than you think at ND, but it may depend on your dad’s income. Is he willing to pay some for college?

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Hopefully they can come back to you with some realistic numbers and expectations. Scholarship websites are honestly a time sink for most folks. I’m pretty much that, for most people, the only “benefit” is getting your email and address out to junk mailers. If you think about, Cappex is a site that lets anyone go on, create a profile, and click ‘Apply’ to as many scholarships as they want. I can do that. You can do that. You could probably train a dog to do that if you smeared peanut butter on your mouse. You’re competing against 11 million other people for small amounts of money, often non-renewable. FastWeb is a little better than that, but not that much better.

Worse still, even if you win, many schools will use outside scholarships to replace their own aid, so you might not even be incrementally close to paying the difference between what you owe them and what need-based aid they might extend to you.

I think you’re definitely on the right track with what you’re doing so far. The main thing is to nail down your budget so that you can see how realistic your parents aspirations are. Private scholarships are unlikely to fill a large chasm or even a small one. A gap year might be extreme if you have some affordable options and I share your distaste for the idea especially if you don’t have anything to do in the interim.

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If you can get a full ride, or close to it, from OU then I recommend taking it. I often tell people that if I were graduating from high school in Ohio now, I would choose OU over both Miami and OSU. I happen to like it a lot. Plus OU’s Honors Tutorial College is an outstanding bargain – the best thing happening at a state university in Ohio. period. Take a look. You could transfer into HTC in January 2016, although it is too late for this fall.
http://www.ohio.edu/honors/future-students/index.cfm
http://www.ohio.edu/honors/future-students/apply.cfm

Well, you can’t afford to pay for college yourself and if they can’t pay, then what other alternative is there? This sounds stark, I know, but sometimes you have to do something drastic. A “gap year” could be your lowest cost alternative. Almost no schools give merit aid to transfer students. Once you have completed even one semester at a college, it will be very hard to transfer to a financially affordable college. If you do choose to attend a college this fall, make sure that you are willing to finish there.

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OP it is very worthwhile for putting in the application etc for UAH - takes only a few minutes. Sorting out your options, you can make a campus visit - be sure to plan ahead so you can see the depts and programs you want to see. UAH is in N AL so the travel distance to Ohio is not as great as perhaps some of the other options for financial safety beyond those in-state.

Since you are not interested in your financial safeties in Ohio, here is a school worth looking at. They have an honors program and solid academic programs. Look on their web site. It is the smallest of the three schools (University of Alabama, University of Alabama in Birmingham, University of Alabama in Huntsville) but is a top 10 Techie place in the country (rated #4 high-tech hot spot behind 3 CA locations), has the second largest research park right next to campus; Redstone Arsenal (NASA, US Army - Missile and Aviation Command, with 4 star General in command), aerospace and government contracting companies like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrup Grumman, etc.

You haven’t said what you want to major in.

You don’t want the major debt in UG. It will limit you. Paying back a large debt is horrendous.

Even from the early years, UAH recognized talent. Discovery Communications founder John Hendricks graduated from UAH (his family was local) - he worked in the office of the first UAH President (Dr Ben Graves was a very smart leader and business academician) before John Hendricks moved on with his career.

You may still be able to secure some private scholarships. Look at your local ones - even $100, $500, $1000. Those larger national scholarships are like the couple of ‘full ride’ scholarships you have talked about, can be very elusive and many deadlines have passed by now.

Put in the right amount of time/effort to secure a good college for you based on your financial constraints, and good luck with getting any outside scholarships. Other posters are correct in that specific University scholarships (their own general, and their specific ones) are the best source.

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This is water under the bridge but you didn’t check out the Cost of Attendance and look at what you would have to come up with after the merit? At this point this is more a cautionary tale for other students.

You need to get over this idea to start with. Any scholarship worth its salt is going to be highly competitive. Any other scholarship will only help you in your first year. What then?

So what does the gap look like for each of your schools? I think some options mentioned earlier (UAH and OU) should be options you consider.

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@suzy100‌ I double checked and Miami will be about $16,000 for me, so that make it my cheapest school. I misremembered the COA for Miami and thought it was more expensive than OSU after the scholarships.
As for my dad’s income, he is a retired school teacher, so no, his income is not high. He does not share much financial information but my mom estimates his income to be about half of what hers is.

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I hate to say this but adding another 50% of income is not going to just add $5K to your EFC.

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I know Cappex and those other websites are pretty popular so I can only imagine how many students will be applying to all of the scholarships. Have you tried private scholarships such as TheHealthy.com Scholarship, Annuity.org Scholarship, or CenturyLinkInternetService.com Scholarship…? There are so many and I do not see them on many sites, they are pretty rare. It is where companies have their own scholarships, I am sure they do not have many applicants. I just found a new website with unique scholarships called ScholarshipOwl, I applied in hopes to be one of the first to those scholarships since it is new and in beta. I would simply put in the Google search STEM scholarships, I am sure there will be many there for you. I have seen many while I was searching for scholarships myself. Best of luck and my best advice would be, avoid student loans later. My friends owe more than they expected in the end.

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@MayaWalker‌ Thanks, I will look at those!