Student Financial Aid News

From the NY Times:

Students looking for college scholarships are going to have a harder time this year as providers, hammered by falling investment returns and declining philanthropic support, cut back. The recession has led foundations, corporations, state governments and colleges themselves to reduce their support of providers of scholarships, and in recent months programs have been reduced or canceled outright. The cuts come as economic conditions make it harder for families to pay for college and as more unemployed people look for financing for retraining. Peterson’s, an online college preparation site owned by the student loan company Nelnet, found that although the number of scholarships rose to 1.7 million in 2008, from 1.4 million a year earlier, the average amount awarded fell nearly 7 percent, to $4,300 from $4,607.

Commentary

A decline of 7% in scholarship funding, while unpleasant, is far less severe than I would have expected to see. Personally, I was expecting numbers around the 20% mark or more, given how many scholarship funds park their actual cash in investments. There’s a clear, strong message nonetheless: the longer the recession goes on, the greater a hit that all of these scholarship funds will take. It’s absolutely imperative that you get super aggressive about finding scholarships as soon as possible and locking down as many as you can.

Get our free college scholarships eBook here.

Sign up for free for our $10,000 scholarship drawing at the end of July.

Scholarship Update

Live abroad and want to study in the US? Does your citizenship status prevent you from enrolling as a US student? myUsearch will award a $1000 scholarship to the student who can best answer how the completion of a US degree will impact their life, their family and their home community. The scholarship is open to any students who have completed the myUsearch matching questionnaire, are NOT a US citizen and will begin their first semester at an accredited US undergraduate institution on or before October 1, 2010 (transfer students are also eligible).

Details at our free college scholarship search site.

5 most recent Financial Aid News articles:

Subscribe to RSS headline updates from:
Powered by FeedBurner