Paying college with scholarships isn’t as simple as it sounds.
- What are College Scholarships?
- What are the Scholarship Types?
- How do students apply for scholarships?
- When can students apply for portable scholarships?
- How long do scholarships last?
- How do students receive the scholarship money?
- What can you spend scholarship money on?
Let’s start with the definition, scholarships are simply free money for students to spend on their education. This basic definition includes scholarships awarded for pre-schools, dance classes, camps, and, of course, colleges. When you start asking what are scholarships in terms of paying for college, things don’t seem as simple any more. Now you have athletic scholarships, academic scholarships, and other various merit scholarships. And scholarships are just one kind of financial aid available for college so you probably need to have some understanding of how it differs from grants, loans, and work-study. However, even as you wade through various definitions, essentially a scholarship is free money for students to spend on their education.
(I’ve updated the number of community colleges with dorms with data available from IPEDS in March, 2023.) As families recoil in horror contemplating the price tag of four years of college, some start to look more closely at all of the available options, including community colleges with dorms. Since community colleges are offering more traditional college amenities such as dorms, honor programs, sports, and student activities, they are becoming a more attractive way for families to seriously cut their college expenses.
In a previous post, I defined 
(Updated for 2023) If you want to get any financial aid, you need to submit college financial aid applications such as the FAFSA and PROFILE. This is obviously a critical step: no application, no aid. But if you want to pay less for college, it certainly isn’t the first step.
In case you haven’t heard, some colleges are more likely to provide you institutional scholarships and grants than others. Some are more generous with merit aid while others give better need-based aid. And just as some colleges are known for their aid, there are those that are known for the lack of it and shouldn’t be found anywhere near a list of affordable colleges. In this post, I’m listing 21 colleges that you should avoid if you’re looking for significant help in cutting the cost of college.
A college comparison spreadsheet is really the most effective way to narrow your list of colleges you want to actually apply to. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s pretty useful when trying to make the final decision on which to attend as well. It’s just that I think that by putting in a little spreadsheet grease at the beginning of the process will provide you with much more affordable choices at the end of the process. The key is to make sure that your college comparison spreadsheet contains these 5 often overlooked pieces of information that will give you some idea of how much you’ll pay for college.
