Whatever Happened to Scholarships?

Once upon a time, if you were a good student, worked hard, and earned good grades, you could hope to win a scholarship to help you pay for college.

Not now.

Today, if you go to all the trouble of locating a good scholarship and applying for it (tons of work) and are actually lucky enough to win it, it probably won't help you one bit.

Why?

Financial aid. Unless you are paying 100% of your college tuition bills (and, let's face it, with a single year of college at $50K at many institutions, few people are) that scholarship money is going to help the college—not you.

That's right. They'll smile, thank you for the money, and happily reduce your amount of aid by the amount of the scholarship award.

Hardly worth the effort now, is it?

That's what you call the law of unintended consequences. You take away the incentive for earning a scholarship and sure enough, people stop trying to win them.

Today, the best financial bet is to get in to one of the highly endowed universities which offer gold-plated financial aid. More on that in an upcoming post.