Michelle Kretzschmar 
In Part Two of How to Find Merit Scholarships, I said that you need to look at the numbers on institutional aid and non-federal loans to get an idea of which schools are more likely to give out merit money. Now we’ll look at some examples to see how it works.
ShareTweetFlipEmailPin0 SharesI have to admit, I like working by myself and taking care of the different things that come up when you’re a “solopreneur.” But while I know I can generally figure out things for myself, sometimes it’s better to have others do specific jobs because that’s their expertise. Right now I’m having hosting a … Read more
In case you haven’t heard, the Super Bowl is this coming Sunday. Sometime during the ridiculously overdone coverage, viewers will see the starters from each team announcing their alma maters. And this has got me thinking. Here you have the two best teams in a championship game based on wins and losses with rosters of players from colleges ranked on wins and losses. Maybe, just maybe, the Super Bowl has something to teach us about rankings including US News College Rankings.
(Part 1 showed how to identify colleges that are likely sources of merit money.)
Now that you know who has the money, you need to target those schools more likely to be giving it away. I do this by looking at information on institutional grants. This is money the school is giving the student and is usually the largest single source of financial aid for an individual student at private schools. Since IPEDS doesn’t require the school to distinguish between need and merit based grants, I also look at the percentage of freshman who receive the institutional grants.
There are 1,586 public and not-for-profit colleges with 500 or more full-time undergraduates. Which of them are likely to give you merit scholarships? Unfortunately, there’s really no one right way to search for such colleges. After all, the college that provides a generous amount of merit scholarship to one student will deny it to another.
ShareTweet6FlipEmailPin17 SharesAll Sessions Now Available Workshop sessions will cover data to consider when searching for colleges including college graduation rates and net price. I’ll also demonstrate how to use different websites to access data for your college search. View when convenient for you at no cost! Session 1 Session 2 Session 3
Despite our best attempts to avoid printing information that we can access from our computers or smart devices, there’s going to be a time when you’ll need, or more likely someone else needs, to print out data from your Excel spreadsheet. Therefore, in this lesson I’ll cover the basics of what you need to know to start printing in Excel.
Sooner or later while you’re looking at the data for a specific college, you’re going to wonder if a certain number is a good thing or a bad thing? It’s at this point you realize it would be good to know the average SAT scores for the schools you’re looking at. Or maybe what are the highest and lowest graduation rates. It would help you put an individual school’s number in context. So this week, I’m going to do an introduction to calculating data in Excel.
Guaranteed tuition programs are one way to save money although they probably have a greater effect at public colleges than private ones. The other guarantee program popping up with increasing frequency is a four-year college graduation guarantee. This means that if it takes you more than four years to graduate, the college will pay for the remaining classes needed to graduate. Given that the average four-year graduation rate is less than 50%, this is an appealing offer.