College scholarships: Show them the money
November 15th, 2011by Jane S. Shropshire, Lexington, KY – Imagine that you are a college admission dean charged with enrolling a freshman class. Your goals are attracting a certain number of students, achieving targets for quality measures such as GPA and ACT, factoring in diversity, and doing all of this within a prescribed budget.
Now imagine that you’re a hiring official for a large company. Certain jobs require special skills or characteristics, and the candidates you want may have plenty of other choices. You, too, have targets to meet and a budget to consider.
Read more at Bizlex.com >>Tagged: Career, Financial aid, Opportunity, Scholarship
Put aside rose-colored glasses and remember: loans must be repaid!
May 9th, 2011Jane Shropshire | Founder – Shropshire Educational Consulting LLC
Congratulations – if you’re reviewing financial aid awards you’ve been admitted to college and hopefully one that excites you. But now it’s time to look through clear lenses at what the awards actually tell you. Look at each college’s billed costs including all fees, then subtract the total amount of grants, scholarships and federal work-study offered. The net figure remaining is what you and your parents will have to cover through family contributions and loans. A word of advice: be conservative in taking out loans, despite colleges offering PLUS (parent) loans by the cartload. Make sure that you and your family will be able to pay off debt incurred without mortgaging your collective future. And if you’ve received more generous offers from other colleges, it can’t hurt to ask a financial aid office politely whether your award can be reviewed and adjusted.
——————————————————————————–
Read more at Unigo.com >>Tagged: College, Debt, Financial aid, Scholarship
Scholarship: a new synonym for discount
November 25th, 2009Several months ago, a letter arrived from a local seafood restaurant, offering $25 toward our next meal there. Weeks later, an invitation to a gathering at a well-known traditional women’s clothing store arrived, promising 20 percent off any purchase made at that event. Just a few days ago at a professional meeting in North Carolina, the parallel practices of the world of higher education, where discounting carries alternate names, hit home for me: merit scholarships, honorary scholarships and need-based financial aid are in expansion mode.
Tuition discounting is not a new concept: need-based financial assistance has cut the sticker price of college for millions of students. A small number of colleges, including Kentucky’s own Berea College, specialize in educating students from low-income backgrounds and enabling them to graduate without debt. Some prominent colleges with sizable endowments and applicant pools have followed this example in recent years, replacing the loan component of their financial aid packages with outright grant funding, drawing more candidates than ever before.
Read more at BizLex.com >>Tagged: College, Financial aid, Scholarship
