During the 2008-2009 academic year, an anonymous donor gave over $100 million to 20 colleges and universities nationwide. A large portion of the donated money was earmarked for university scholarships, specifically for minorities and women. Now, schools are beginning to spend the money, and The Chronicle of Higher Education is charting where the money is going.

So far, over 3,700 students at 15 schools have benefited from the money in some way, ranging from $100 book grants to scholarship awards of $5,000 per year or more. Students are also receiving indirect benefits of the donated money, as schools are using some of the discretionary funds to close gaps in their budgets left by reduced state spending and endowment losses, as well as to build up student resources and better support faculty research.

Primarily, though, the money is going towards scholarships. In addition to the funds already awarded, several of the schools plan to unveil scholarship programs in 2010, or to expand scholarship opportunities already offered through funding from the anonymous donor. Need-based and merit-based academic scholarships are being expanded or created and will reach out to students ranging from urban students attending Purdue University to military spouses at the University of Maryland University College.

A number of the colleges are looking for ways to jumpstart permanent endowed scholarship funds with the anonymous donations. Michigan State University and the University of Hawaii at Hilo are both starting matching-grant funds to encourage more donations for endowed scholarships on their campuses. California State University at Northridge is hoping to ultimately support 50 students a year through a freshman honors scholarship program begun with the donated money.

These generous donations from an anonymous source are changing students’ lives nationwide and making paying for school easier. Universities are hoping that news of the donations and the continued good they’re doing will spur others to give generously to scholarship programs. In the meantime, though, many individuals and organizations are already offering sizeable amounts of scholarship money to a wide range of deserving students. Conduct a free scholarship search to see some of these opportunities that may benefit you.

Posted: under College News, Scholarships.
Tags: academic scholarships, college news, college scholarships, institutional aid, Scholarships

Comments (0) Oct 19 2009

September 15 to October 15 is National Hispanic Heritage Month.  This annual event was started in 1968 by President Lyndon Johnson, and was initially known as Hispanic Heritage Week.  It was expanded to a month-long celebration of Hispanic and Latino history in 1988 by President Reagan.  Schools, municipalities, and organizations nationwide take this opportunity to honor the culture and heritage of Hispanics in America and to celebrate the achievements of notable Hispanic Americans.

Hispanics were some of the first residents of what is now the United States of America, with Spanish-speaking settlers arriving in Florida and the Southwest in the 1500s.  Currently, Hispanic Americans make up over 15 percent of the population of the United States, making them the second largest ethnic group in the nation.  Hispanic Americans have played notable roles in events throughout the history of the country and many prominent figures in business, entertainment and government proudly claim Hispanic heritage.

As a result, there is a lot to celebrate in Hispanic Heritage Month.  In addition to the achievements of Hispanic Americans, Hispanic Heritage Month also celebrates the independence of several Latin American countries, as the dates coincide with the anniversaries of independence of Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Chile and Belize.

There are even scholarship awards offered in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, including this week’s Scholarship of the Week, the PRIMERO Hispanic Heritage Scholarship.  This $10,000 award was created in recognition of the achievements of Hispanic families who put their children through college and is meant to help realize the dreams of students who are the first in their families to attend college.  In addition to awards that specifically celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, a number of other Hispanic scholarships are also available to help advance the education and achievements of Hispanic Americans.

To find out more about scholarship opportunities for Hispanic students or more general scholarships for minorities, conduct a free scholarship search on Scholarships.com.

Posted: under College Culture, Scholarships.
Tags: college scholarships, Minority Scholarships, Scholarship of the Week, Scholarships

Comments (0) Sep 21 2009

High school seniors in a school district in Texas will receive $1 million in scholarships after their district was named the winner of this year’s Broad Prize for Urban Education.  The award is offered annually by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and is designed to reward notable gains in student achievement and in narrowing the achievement gap for poor and minority students.  Aldine Independent School District, which serves the Houston area, won the top prize this year, after having previously been a runner up for the prize three times.

The Broad Foundation names five finalists each year and from them, chooses a winner for the $1 million Broad Prize.  This year, the other finalists were Broward County, Florida (a two-time finalist); Long Beach, California (a former winner and three-time finalist); Socorro Independent School District in El Paso, Texas; and Gwinnet County Public Schools in the Atlanta, Georgia area.

Aldine won the prize based on a number of factors.  The Broad Foundation cited the district’s gains in breaking “the predictive power of poverty,” as the district’s predominately low-income students outperformed peers of similar backgrounds on state standardized tests.  The achievement gap for both low-income and minority students has been closing at Aldine, with a 14-point reduction in the achievement gap for African-American middle schoolers in math over the last four years.  Other successes included Aldine’s recruitment of highly qualified teachers, engagement with students, and districtwide standardization of education practices and curriculum (many poor families move around within the district, so making what is taught in each grade more uniform across the district helps them keep from falling behind).

The scholarship awards will help further the success of graduates from Aldine, with $20,000 over four years going to students who enroll in four-year colleges and universities and up to $5,000 over two years going to students who enroll in community colleges.  Students at other finalist schools will also receive scholarship money:  each of the prize’s four finalist districts will receive $250,000 to award to their high school students.

Posted: under High School, High School News, Scholarships.
Tags: college scholarships, High School, High School News, high school student scholarships, high school students, Scholarships, state news, Texas scholarships

Comments (0) Sep 18 2009

As unemployment rates remain high and budgets stay tight, more people are looking to wait out the struggling economy by going back to college. Competition then has become more fierce not only on the admissions level, but for funding to pay for those educations. While many schools are doing whatever they can to continue offering scholarships and grants, the economy has affected some schools’ available funding. Good news is, scholarships do exist, and there are things you can do to have a better chance of landing one.

• Apply early, and apply often. Scholarships wait for no one, and a later deadline doesn’t mean you should wait until the very last moment to apply. Generous scholarships like the Coca-Cola Scholars Program have deadlines in October, for example. It’s not a bad move to look ahead and start applying for awards beyond this year, either, to get an idea of funding you’ll need in the future. To see scholarships that have deadlines this fall, conduct a a free scholarship search and see the dozens you could be eligible for.
• Don’t rule out local scholarships. While funding packages from your intended college are often more generous than outside awards, it won’t hurt to supplement any funding you’re awarded or have a backup plan in case what your school offers covers less of your fees than you thought. Local scholarships from your dad’s employer or your local bowling league are also less competitive than college-based awards or the more well-known contests, and often look at things beyond your GPA and test scores to factor in things like community service, your experience with that organization and financial need. New scholarships are being created all the time, so check on your search throughout the school year for the most up-to-date results.
• Stand out on the application. It’s not too late to make up for that less-than-stellar grade in your high school Algebra class, especially if you’re looking ahead to scholarship opportunities beyond your freshman year in college. GPAs matter from your entire high school career, so don’t slack off when the senioritis hits. Don’t be afraid of AP classes unless it’s a subject you know you’d get a low grade in, and get involved in your school and your community as it’s also not always about academics. Work on that resume by applying for internships that fit your intended major, and put in more hours of practice if you’re going for a sports or music scholarship. It’s never too late to make yourself a more desirable scholarship candidate.
• Appeal your award. If you’ve done everything you can - filled out your FAFSA early, put together impressive scholarship applications - and you feel the financial aid you’ve been offered from your school is unfair or if your circumstances have changed dramatically since applying for government aid, you still have options. Schools are more likely to reconsider packages in the current climate, and you could be eligible for more grant and scholarship funding, the best kind that you don’t need to pay back.

For more information on upcoming scholarships and other helpful financial aid tips, visit our College Resources. Tomorrow, we’ll explore your options on keeping college costs low and looking at a school’s program versus its reputation.

Posted: under College Costs, College and the Economy, FAFSA, Financial Aid, Scholarships, Tips.
Tags: College and the Economy, college scholarships, economy, high school students, local scholarships, undergraduate scholarships

Comments (0) Sep 14 2009

Often, scholarship opportunities also serve as opportunities for students to think about and respond to pressing issues of the day, and one of the problems weighing most heavily on society in the last year has been the global economic crisis.  While the recession has begun showing signs of abating, it is still creating serious problems in several areas of life, ranging from paying for school to owning a home.

Homeowners have been facing threats of foreclosure due to a combination of factors related to the recession, and this problem could still get worse before it gets better.  The real estate website Foreclosure.com is sponsoring a scholarship essay contest that invites college students to propose solutions to the ongoing spike in foreclosures.  With a $5,000 top prize for the scholarship essay that best explains “how to solve the foreclosure crisis,” the Foreclosure.com Scholarship Program is this week’s Scholarship of the Week.

Prize:

Top prize: $5,000

Four runners-up: $1,000

Eligibility:

Students who are currently enrolled in or have been accepted to an accredited college, university, law school or trade school in the United States.  U.S. citizenship is required.

Posted: under Scholarship of the Week, Scholarships.
Tags: college scholarships, essay scholarship, graduate student scholarships, Scholarship of the Week, Scholarship Search, Scholarships, undergraduate scholarships, writing scholarship

Comments (0) Sep 14 2009

The Families of Freedom Scholarship Fund will provide $8.4 million in college scholarships this coming school year to the children, spouses and domestic partners of those who lost their lives in the September 11th terrorist attacks.

About half of that total has already been distributed for the fall semester to 520 students in mainly the New York and New Jersey region. The rest will go out in December for semesters starting in January. The needs-based fund, managed by Scholarship America, was created shortly after the terrorists attacks in 2001 thanks to an initial $1 million pledge from the Lumina Foundation for Education and the outpouring of donations that followed. Colleges and universities, organizations, and individuals across the country led by fundraising campaign co-chairs President Bill Clinton and U.S. Senator Bob Dole eventually raised about $125 million, with more in the years that followed. More than $46 million has been awarded since January 2002 to about 1,400 students, and the fund is set to continue giving out scholarships through 2030.

The average award this year was about $16,000, with everyone receiving at least $1,000 and one top award of $40,000. Those who were left permanently disabled in the attacks are also eligible. The fund’s organizers claim there are still more than 5,400 students eligible for the scholarships. About $7.4 million was awarded for the last school year, and if this year’s disbursement is any indicator, the scholarship amounts are only expected to rise.

Several companies and organizations set up scholarship funds for the families of victims in the September 11th terrorists attacks, including the National Law Enforcement And Firefighters Childrens Foundation Scholarship, which awards scholarships to children of law enforcement and firefighting personnel who were lost in the line of duty, and the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which provides emergency short-term financial assistance and emotional and mental health support to those who lost loved ones in not only the terrorist attacks, but other disasters and emergencies.

Posted: under College News, Scholarships.
Tags: college scholarships, need-based, scholarship winners, september 11

Comments (0) Sep 11 2009

Penn State University’s Schreyer Honors College offers admitted students $3,500 per year merit scholarships, a common practice among state colleges that want to entice the best students to attend.  Students at Penn State and their parents are doing something unique with these scholarship awards, though: they’re giving them to other Schreyer students.

Parents of scholarship recipients who did not apply for need-based financial aid receive a letter asking them to consider making a donation in the amount of the scholarship their children received.  The letter, penned by the parents of other Schreyer students, emphasizes the amount of unmet financial need some of their children’s classmates face and asks them to consider whether they need the extra $3,500 in order to pay their tuition bill.  If not, they are asked to give the money to students for whom the extra money could make the difference between attending college at Penn State and staying home.

The university stresses that students are not being asked to give up their academic scholarships in this campaign. Rather, they ask that parents who can spare the extra money because their child received a scholarship would consider donating to help other deserving students who last year had more than $1 million in unmet financial need.

Honors colleges, even at large state universities, tend to be relatively close-knit communities of top-performing students who are engaged in their studies and their campus communities.  It’s not surprising, then, that parents of Schreyer Honors College students hit upon an idea to help their children’s struggling classmates last year when the economy first began to sink into recession.  The campaign was initiated by parents and supported by the university, which sends the letters on the parents’ behalf.

Last year’s appeal raised around $228,000, with over $120,000 of that going directly to 34 students who needed help paying for school.  The remaining $100,000 went towards establishing an endowed trust to ensure that this effort continues helping students in the future.  So far this year, the campaign has raised $13,000 from 11 donors.

Posted: under College News, College and the Economy, Financial Aid, Scholarships.
Tags: academic scholarships, College and the Economy, college news, college scholarships, Financial Aid, merit-based, need-based, Pennsylvania scholarships, Scholarships

Comments (0) Sep 09 2009

Even in the face of a continuing recession, new scholarship opportunities are being made available to students in a variety of situations.  Recently, students in two communities in Michigan, a state hit especially hard by economic problems, have received news of scholarship programs that will give them significant help paying for school, even as the state considers cutting funding to one of its largest merit scholarship awards.

Baldwin, a community in rural northern Michigan, is the first to take advantage of the state’s “Promise Zones” program, which allows areas with a high percentage of poor students to use state property tax funds to provide college scholarships for their students.  Baldwin plans to offer scholarships of up to $5,000 for up to four years to current high school seniors.  Up to nine other high-poverty communities in Michigan are eligible to participate in the program, provided they, like Baldwin, raise money to fund their scholarships for the first two years of awards.  The Promise Zone funding, like the state’s endangered Michigan Promise scholarship, were inspired by the Kalamazoo Promise scholarship, a full-tuition scholarship award created by an anonymous private donor that allows graduates of Kalamazoo public schools to attend any college in Michigan for four years.

Another Michigan community has also unveiled a substantial scholarship program for its high school students, this time a four-year full-tuition award to Finlandia University for all graduates of public schools in Hancock, a tiny mining town in the state’s Upper Peninsula, who gain admission to the college.  The scholarship program was created as Finlandia’s way of paying the community for the use of a building that the school district no longer needed.  Rather than working out a traditional payment plan for the purchase of the building, something complicated by tighter credit requirements, FInlandia proposed a deal that would provide more immediate and tangible benefits to the students of Hancock.  The scholarships will be offered to members of Finlandia’s current freshmen class and to subsequent graduates of Hancock’s schools.

Local scholarships like these exist for communities nationwide, and are likely to seek out inventive ways to find funding, as community members are committed to helping their neighbors succeed.  To find out more about scholarship opportunities for students in your area, conduct a free scholarship search.

Posted: under College News, College and the Economy, Scholarships.
Tags: College and the Economy, college news, college scholarships, full-tuition scholarships, local scholarships, Michigan scholarships, Scholarship Search, Scholarships, state news, state scholarship

Comments (0) Sep 08 2009

The University of Texas has announced plans to withdraw as a sponsor of National Merit, a popular national scholarship program that students qualify for based on standardized test scores.  In an effort to focus on providing need-based financial aid, the university will no longer offer scholarships specifically for National Merit Scholars.  The University of Texas, which was second only to Harvard University in the number of National Merit Finalists it enrolled, offered qualifying students awards worth up to $13,000 over the course of four years.

Texas is not the first major university system to choose to cease participating in National Merit, a program that offers $2,500 scholarships to high school juniors who do well on the PSAT, with the potential for honorees to receive much larger scholarship awards from partner companies and universities.  Other institutions, including the University of California system, have previously chosen to withdraw sponsorship of National Merit, while many other schools have chosen not to offer awards specifically for National Merit winners.

National Merit has previously drawn criticism for its strong emphasis on high PSAT scores (other application materials are considered in selecting finalists, but semifinalists are chosen solely based on test scores).  Students from wealthier families who have access to the best high schools and a variety of test preparation resources typically do best on standardized tests, such as the PSAT, which results in scholarship awards like National Merit skewing towards affluent students who need less assistance paying for college.

A University of Texas official cited similar reasoning in the university’s decision to stop awarding National Merit Scholarships, stating that only one fourth of students receiving the scholarships typically bothered to apply for federal student financial aid, indicating the vast majority had access to other means of covering their college costs.  The students who are most likely to be hurt by the loss of this scholarship opportunity will likely be helped by the increase in need-based financial aid that the university is promising.

University officials stressed that applicants who would have been eligible for this award will still be able to compete for other academic scholarships, and the undergraduate students currently receiving this award will continue to do so for their full four years of eligibility.  Still, this announcement is likely to upset some students and to fuel the fires of the ongoing debate over merit-based versus need-based financial aid in colleges and universities.

Posted: under College Costs, College News, Financial Aid, High School, Scholarships.
Tags: academic scholarships, college news, college scholarships, Financial Aid, high school students, merit-based, need-based, PSAT, state colleges

Comments (0) Sep 02 2009

Scholarship opportunities abound for students who devote their time and energy to helping those around them.  One such opportunity is this week’s Scholarship of the Week. The Coca-Cola Scholars Program, one of the most generous and well-known community service scholarships, is awarded each year to high school students who have demonstrated academic achievement and community involvement.

Current high school seniors can win up to $20,000 towards their college education through this scholarship program.  By demonstrating the ways they’ve served their communities and made a positive impact on the world, students can earn one of 250 four-year achievement-based scholarships from the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation.  Finalists will also receive a trip to Atlanta for personal interviews and an awards ceremony.

Prize:

50 National Scholars awards of $20,000

200 Regional Scholars awards of $10,000

Eligibility:

Current high school seniors (at the time of application) attending school in the United States with a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0.  Applicants must be US citizens or permanent residents planning to pursue a degree at an accredited college or university in the United States.

Posted: under High School, Scholarship of the Week, Scholarships.
Tags: college scholarships, community service, community service scholarships, High School, high school student scholarships, Scholarship of the Week, Scholarship Search, Scholarships

Comments (0) Aug 31 2009