Blog

~ A word from our founder, The HomeScholar Emeritus, Lee Binz ~

This is a chapter from my book, College Scholarships for High School Credit: Learn and Earn With This Two-for-One Strategy! You can purchase a copy in print or Kindle version on Amazon.

Chapter 1

How to Win Private Scholarships: Find

If you search "college scholarships" on Google, you'll get about 6.5 million hits! As much as you'd like to think 6.5 million scholarships would be a wonderful thing, it is not humanly possible to apply for 6.5 million scholarships, even over four years of college and certainly not in one year of college or high school. Instead, use a search engine specifically for scholarships. Good ones to try are www.fastweb.com, www.collegenet.com, www.finaid.org, www.edfinancial.com, and www.scholarships.com. Some scholarships are unique to specific states, so try Googling your state and the word "scholarship" and see what shows up.

After you log on to a scholarship site, the first thing to do is input information about your student. The more you tell them about your student, the more tailored to them the scholarship search will be. As much as this seems counter intuitive, you need to narrow the scholarships down to ones your child is qualified for. It's impossible to apply for 400 scholarships anyway, so the best way to filter them is to input your student's information.

This takes a long time. When you're filling these out for the first time, allow yourself at least two hours to input information. This narrows the possibilities from 6.5 million hits to a few hundred. If each scholarship takes a week to apply to, and there are only 36 weeks of school, it doesn't add up! Even if your child worked all year round, they still couldn't apply for four hundred scholarships. You need to keep it down to maybe 30 or 40 scholarships to apply to throughout the year.

In addition to scholarship search engines, look over scholarships won by family and friends, other high school students, and scholarships available through local businesses. When our sons were in their senior year of high school, I was surprised by how many scholarships I saw on store walls. Be open to the different avenues through which you might hear about scholarships.

Looking for college scholarships takes a lot of time, but it's well worth it. After all, who doesn't want free money for college?! We searched our local high school's scholarship databases. School districts often have an entire page devoted to scholarships. Another method we pursued was to Google the words "scholarship" along with words that described our sons' areas of specialization, such as "chess" or "economics."

Only spend your energy pursuing scholarships your child is qualified for. Like baseball, it can be boiled down to one statement: "One strike and you're out." As you look at a scholarship, the moment you see a requirement or preference that eliminates your child, give up on that scholarship and move on. It doesn't matter how much you want that $20,000, if it says it's only for girls and you have a boy, you're out! You may have a hundred scholarships to weed through, so you don't have time to argue about how your child should be allowed to apply.

Eliminate the scholarship immediately as well if it requires skills your child does not have. For instance, it would have been lovely for my son to apply for a scholarship that involved making a YouTube video about economics. Unfortunately, although he knew economics, he didn't know how to create a video for YouTube!

Once you're this far and have filtered out all the scholarships your student is not qualified for, read the fine print. Check the details to see if, for instance, there's an exclusion for homeschoolers. This rarely happens, but you want to find this out before you fill out the application. Next, make a cost/benefit analysis. Sometimes the smaller essays are easier to win, so smaller ones might be better for your student to pursue. Local scholarships can also be easier to win because they have fewer applicants.

Something else to keep in mind is how much work an application will take versus how much money your child might get for it. If it requires a 3,000-word essay on a topic your child doesn't love and they're only awarding $50, it may not be worth it. On the other hand, if it's a 150-word poem and the monetary reward is $2,000, it might be worth it. Weigh your child's interest versus the motivation to fill it out.

College Scholarships for High School Credits is one of my Coffee Break Books. What are Coffee Break Books? These are books designed for YOU - a busy homeschool parent feeling frustrated by something, and needing information NOW - all put together in an easy-to-read, short, simple format. Coffee Break Books are perfect for overwhelmed, sleep-deprived moms with a baby on their hip. Simple, large font makes them easy to read even when distracted or pulled in a million directions. They are designed to help parents tackle just ONE issue of homeschooling during just ONE coffee break! Each book combines a practical and friendly approach with detailed, easy-to-digest information. Never overwhelming, always accessible and manageable, each book in the series will give you the tools you need to tackle the tasks of homeschooling high school, one warm sip at a time.

Learn more about College Scholarships for High School Credits in my video review below!

This is a chapter from my book, College Scholarships for High School Credit: Learn and Earn With This Two-for-One Strategy! You can purchase a copy in print or Kindle version on Amazon.