Caveat Emptor or Buyer Beware 20: Hurdles to Getting Financial Aid

Saturday’s we share a tip or caution to facilitate getting scholarships or avoiding problems

Erika served as a high school guidance counselor for more than 14 years. She specialized in helping students apply for scholarships. She helped hundreds of students earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships. She created a program that used students with great grades to tutor struggling students. As a result, she helped them increase ACT test scores from 26 to 32. She represents guidance counselors around the country who work hard for our students. We express our appreciation and gratitude for all of their efforts. Thank you!

Increasingly Difficult to Get Scholarships

We’ve recently surveyed several guidance and financial aid counselors about changes in finding scholarships. They concur with our assessment that applying for financial aid became increasingly difficult over the last few years.

Hurdles that appeared over the last several years include:

• Less money available for financial aid since economies plummeted
• More scams, contests, phishing expeditions, surveys, and other useless offerings
• Greater review of social media by scholarship committees
• Greater competition for less money means higher standards and requirements to win
• Old schemes do not garner the attention they used to receive in more plush times
• Questions on applications and essays change more frequently and extensively
• Scholarship search engines generate 30% of all scholarships they used to generate
• Web pages for scholarships change more frequently sending you to erroneous sites
• More work receives less reward creating greater frustration

Let Others Help You

You will need more help than ever before to get the money offered by scholarship committees. Your advisors will require more experience and expertise to help you. Consider asking the following people to help you:

• High school guidance counselors—seek out the one that is the expert on scholarships
• Financial aid counselors in both your specific department and general university
• Students who recently received several scholarships themselves
• Counselors at social programs for single women, minorities, youth at risk, etc.
• Paid scholarship advisors, but investigate them thoroughly since some do not deliver

Tuesday we review Epilepsy Foundation Behavioral Science Student Fellowship as a source

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