Academic Common Market helps with college costs
January 24th, 2013By Jane S. Shropshire
Students limiting their college searches by cost may want to know about the Academic Common Market (ACM), which allows Kentucky residents to pay in-state tuition rates to study in certain programs in other Southeastern states.
Coordinated by the Southern Regional Education Board, the ACM includes programs in states throughout the Southeast with the exception of North Carolina, which is phasing out its participation. Kentucky has participated since the early 1970s, initially for graduate studies only.
Read more at BizLex.com >>Tagged: College, Financial aid
Investing in college: Affordable options for preparing for debt
July 18th, 2012By Jane S. Shropshire
When in Boston recently for a conference, I met a fellow educational consultant from China. Hearing I was from Kentucky, he asked, “Tuition is very reasonable at Kentucky, yes?”
I paused before answering. Through the eyes of his clients, tuition at the University of Kentucky seems a comparative bargain, yet the first priorities of a public institution should be affordability and excellence for its state’s residents.
Read more at Bizlex.com >>Tagged: College, Financial aid, Local happenings
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.
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Read more at Unigo.com >>Tagged: College, Debt, Financial aid, Scholarship
