Paying For Your College Tuition

General Scholarships
General scholarships are funds for student financial assistance that are not tied to a specific purpose or designated category. Many schools refer to general scholarships as merit scholarships because they use many merit-based selection factors. General scholarships can use some minimum level of GPA as well as extra-curricular activities and community involvement. General scholarships differ from academic scholarships based solely on GPA, ACT scores, and SAT scores. General scholarships also differ from degree-specific awards in that students can apply for general scholarships before they establish a major field of study. These scholarships do recognize need as a factor and often prioritize students with demonstrated need.

Degree Specific Scholarships
Some scholarships support students looking to earn a specific degree. Examples of degree specific scholarships include nursing, teaching, and business education. Many private scholarships are degree-specific. Students should search for scholarships sponsored by states and professional associations that may seek to raise the number of professionals, educators, and practitioners in the field. For example, many accounting and auditing associations offer scholarships which support students that choose to major in these fields. Degree-specific scholarships can be needs based, gender-based, or minority focused. They could also be purely academic and seek to reward students with high academic achievements, such as GPAs of 3.5 and higher, and high scores on the SAT or ACT.

Military Service
Military service based financial aid has several forms. Veterans assistance programs provide tuition assistance in the form of the GI Bill and Post 9/11 GI Bill. These programs provide up to 356 months of tuition assistance. At the top tier of service, the VA tuition assistance pays full tuition at public schools or up to $21,970 at private schools. Students can get housing allowances and book stipends. One special feature, called the Yellow Ribbon Program allows the private school and the VA to share the excess charges after applying the original VA tuition assistance. In the Yellow Ribbon Program, participating schools agree to match up to half of the funding need, and the VA pays a matching amount. The goal is to reduce the veteran’s out-of-pocket tuition expense to zero.

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The Reserve Officers Training Corp is a source of scholarship for many students. They can participate in military training along with college coursework and graduate with a bachelor’s degree and a commission in the US Army, Air Force, or Marines. ROTC provides scholarship aid and a monthly stipend.

Military service is a basis for financial aid for the active service member, veteran, and family members. For example, the federal government created the Iraq and Afghanistan Service Grant for military scholarships. The Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grant awards money to children of those who died in Iraq or Afghanistan after 9/11.

Women (Gender-based) Financial Aid
Women have targeted grants, scholarships, and loan funds that seek to promote opportunities for women in specific fields, as well as towards higher education more generally. Women professional associations are a leading source of women-focused scholarships, mentoring, and other types of support. There are professional women’s scholarships in accounting, business, and engineering.

Some programs support older women. For example, many women-focused scholarships have gap funding. These grants and scholarships focus on women that have interrupted their education progression - the education gap - for reasons that are common for women scholars. Gap scholarships address interruptions such as care-giving for young children and aging parents, childbirth, or other sacrifices routinely made by women for their families. These financial aid sources attempt to encourage and support women that have faced and overcome structural barriers to educational achievement.

Minority Students
Minority students come from groups that have been underrepresented at many levels of educational attainment and professional participation. Many schools and programs use the phrase ‘diverse students’ or the word ‘diversity’ to indicate a focus on a broader group consisting of women, minorities, and students with LGBTQ sexual orientation. Minority group students should look for programs that focus on diversity as possible sources of aid.

Minority scholarships include tribal benefits and other efforts aimed at First Nation peoples including Alaska native tribes. In many cases, minority scholarships also include women of color as a specific group. Whether the purpose of a program is to correct traditional under-representation or combat the effects of long-enduring barriers to participation, students should examine the criteria for eligibility.

Undergraduate Scholarships
Undergraduate scholarships aim to assist graduating high school seniors, recent high school graduates, and first through fifth-year college students. Many scholarships include first-year students and graduating high school seniors while some undergraduate scholarships focus on first-year students exclusively. There are groups of scholarships that focus on students that live in specific areas, such as a county or group of counties, and some focus on particular high schools. Students may have to reach GPA minimums and ACT or SAT score ranges to qualify. Some degree-specific scholarships may also be undergraduate scholarships. These may restrict eligibility to third, fourth, and fifth-year students or those that have declared a major in an eligible field of study.

Graduate Scholarships
Advanced degree students include those in master’s degree, doctoral degree, post-doctoral, and graduate level certification programs. Graduate scholarships can be degree-specific, based on gender, ethnicity, or military status. They can include work-study type programs or graduate assistant positions, and they can be from federal, state, school, or private sources. Often the sources of graduate scholarships are occupational or professional groups that seek to expand the supply of professionals, educators, and under-represented groups. Graduate scholarships serve the additional function of providing a core of educators that can fill faculty positions and help train and mentor future faculty members.

K12 Scholarships
The cost of college tuition has risen steadily for a few decades. Many families will not have enough money set aside to provide their child adequate resources to cover all the expenses, such as tuition, books, other fees, and on-campus living expenses. However, if you can amass some good, quality scholarships to cover the shortfall, you can attend the college of their dreams.

Student Loan Programs
The federal government, many state governments, and the military use loan-forgiveness scholarships. Students that pursue degrees in professions and geographic areas with unmet need can find loan forgiveness as an excellent way to finance their education. Loan forgiveness programs use loans that cover tuition and required fees as an incentive for students that will agree to accept assignments after graduation in specific professions, specialties, and/or locations. For example, a state government may offer loan forgiveness to attract teachers that can teach STEM subjects in urban high schools. In this way, a state can fill an unmet need. Similar examples exist for nurses and skilled medical professions.