DISCLAIMER: I am detouring today from my usual humor fare to bring parents some financial advice. I am NOT a financial advisor, nor do I have the money a financial advisor makes. If I did, my butler would be writing this.
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Sometimes parenting means asking the tough questions, like, “Is it okay if my kids don’t go to college because I would like my retirement age to be under 137?”
That’s a tough one.
I’m a dad in his 50s and have four children. My oldest two are in college. I’ve had torn biceps, hernias, kidney stones, shoulder surgeries, and vasectomy, and all those combined are still not as painful as getting my kids’ tuition bills in the mail.
College isn’t free here in the US, folks. Not by a longshot.
According to the Education Data Initiative[1], the average total cost (tuition plus books/residency/ beer, etc.) of attending a public, 4-year in-state college is over $25,864 a year. If your child wants to attend a university out of state, well that figure jumps to $43,721 a year.
Those are public schools. If you want to attend a private non-profit, that cost jumps to an average of $53,949 every year.
Did you throw up yet?
I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have the name “Jeff Bezos” on my business card. In fact, I don’t have business cards. If I had a business card it would say, “Rodney Lacroix’s Business Card” because I was only able to afford to buy one card, so now I just show it to people and have them commit it to memory.
Jobted.com [2] states that the average yearly salary in the US was $53,490 which — if you’ve been paying attention- is $500 less than one year of private college. Sorry, son, for that price you’ll need to play water polo recreationally after you graduate from community college because that’s all we can afford.
Finding the money to pay for college is hard, so most people simply turn to college loans. The good news there is that, once they graduate, the loans are no longer your burden. The bad news is that the child will now be living in your basement until he is in his mid-40s because, according to StudentLoanPlanner.com[3], he will have to pay back about $37,000 of borrowed money.
But why borrow the cow when you can just get a free cow and pay for college with free milk?
I think I got that analogy wrong.
What I mean is, why borrow money when the wonderful world of scholarships exists?
I have a love-hate relationship with scholarships.
I love the fact that a scholarship if awarded, will save my kids money.
I hate the fact that scholarships are kind of hard to get and are so specific to who they award them to that searching for one your child can apply to is super annoying. I once Tweeted this:
I wish I was joking. There is literally a scholarship for people pursuing careers in Animal Husbandry. So, um, congrats Kevin. You win this one, I guess.
That said, you can use this exclusivity to your advantage.
There are a few resources you can use to whittle these searches down, like Scholarships America or College Board (most of which High School Juniors or Seniors have access to), but the searching is still daunting. Once you start filtering by state or intended major, things start slimming themselves down to a manageable list of roughly 800 scholarships you must thumb through.
It’s a mind-numbing process, but once you realize that you have literally tens of thousands of dollars up for grabs, it’s worth a little effort.
Why?
According to Forbes[4], over $100 million dollars in scholarship money every year goes unclaimed, mostly due to a lack of applicants.
My son, for instance, received both local Recreational Baseball and Recreational Soccer scholarships, for a total amount of $2,000. How did he qualify for these? He played 7 years of recreational soccer and — literally — a half-inning of baseball at age 5 before he decided he didn’t like it.
But he played in the baseball league, so he was eligible and was eventually awarded it.
Is Grandpa a member of the local Elks lodge? Is there a veteran in the family? Is the student Italian, Chinese or Ukrainian? Does the child have psoriasis?
There are scholarships for all of those. My son received both the Ukrainian and psoriasis scholarships (yes, those are real). His grandfather is Ukrainian, and he has had mile psoriasis since age 15.
My son also received several teaching scholarships. His initial plan was to major in History with the Education track, so he applied for all scholarships aimed at both the History/Social Sciences majors AND education tracts.
He was awarded the scholarships, attended one semester of his required college courses, and then decided he wanted to change his college major to Business. The scholarships, however, had been paid, and — reading the fine print — none of them said, “We want to see a picture of you as a teacher five years from now or else give us back the money.”
The moral of the story:
You can’t get the money if you don’t try.
I can tell you this because we didn’t pay a dime out-of-pocket for his university costs for his freshman year. His 529 plan won’t need to be touched until his sophomore year, and his Federally granted loans for his first year in college are basically nil.
There is a fine line here, though, please don’t get me wrong. Read the fine print, if there are no qualifying factors that make your child eligible, move on to the next one. That said, you can — and will — find dozens of scholarships locally and nationally, that are worth looking into. If there are no veterans in your family, or you are not of Ukrainian descent, keep walking. Don’t be a douche and take that money out of someone else’s pocket.
BUT if you do qualify — even remotely — then apply. Again, think of that $100 million every year that goes unawarded because people simply didn’t bother filling out the application. If the application that they do receive is your child’s then, well, cha-ching.
Don’t let the scholarships sail right by.
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[1] Education Data Initiative, https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college, November 15, 2021
[2] Jobted.com, https://www.jobted.com/salary,
[3] StudentLoanPlanner.com, https://www.studentloanplanner.com/student-loan-debt-statistics-average-student-loan-debt/, 2021
[4] Forbes.com, https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcperna/2021/11/01/100-million-in-scholarship-money-goes-unclaimed-every-year-does-it-have-to/?sh=449d2b9d3b6f, 2021
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Mathieu Stern on Unsplash