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Top 10 Myths About Scholarships

September 23, 2011, 1:37 pm

By Beckie Supiano

New Orleans–For all of the good information available to help students figure out how to pay for college, there are also more than a few urban legends  about who gets money and why. Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of the web sites FinAid and FastWeb, tried to clear up some of these misunderstandings at a session of the NACAC meeting here on Friday, where he shared ten myths about college scholarships.

  1. Only straight- “A” students win scholarships: Students with better grades and test scores are more likely to win scholarships, Mr. Kantrowitz said, but some of the money does go to “B” and “C” students. Not every scholarship considers academic qualifications, Mr. Kantrowitz said,  including one of his favorites, a contest to make the best prom outfits out of duct tape.
  2. Only minority students win scholarships: White students are actually disproportionately likely to win awards, as Mr. Kantrowitz shows in a recent paper.
  3. My child will get a full-ride scholarship: There are some full-ride scholarships out there, but Mr. Kantrowitz has calculated that only 0.3 percent of students win enough money to cover their cost of attendance. Two-thirds of the students who win scholarships receive less than $2,500.
  4. Only athletes win scholarships: Only a small fraction of institutional aid is awarded based on athletics, Mr. Kantrowitz said, and the average athletic scholarship only covers about a third of the cost of college.
  5. Only the poor win scholarships: Mr. Kantrowitz has found that middle-income students are more likely to win private scholarships than their low-income peers. Private scholarships are not usually based on financial need.
  6. Scholarships are just for high-school seniors: Students can apply for some scholarships as early as kindergarten, Mr. Kantrowiz said, and can continue to apply for some after beginning college.
  7. The cost of private high school is earned back in scholarships: Students who attend private high schools do win a bit more in scholarships–about $1,000 of institutional and private money combined. But that pales in comparison to the cost of sending a child to a private high school, Mr. Kantrowitz said.
  8. $6.6-billion in scholarships went unclaimed last year: Claims like this one are based on an outdated–and unrelated–study about employer tuition assistance, Mr. Kantrowitz said. “There are a handful of scholarships that go unclaimed, but that’s because they can’t be claimed,” he said. Sometimes no one meets the criteria.
  9. Colleges will just reduce other aid if a student has a scholarship: It’s important to know a college’s outside-scholarship policy, Mr. Kantrowitz said, but most try to ensure that students keep some financial benefit for winning a scholarship.
  10. Applying for scholarships is more work than it’s worth: Searching for scholarships is easy with the help of sites like his, Mr. Kantrowitz said, and it’s no harder to apply for them than for admission. Small scholarships and those requiring essays tend to be easier to win, as fewer students apply. “The bottom line,” Mr. Kantrowitz said,  ”is if you don’t apply for a scholarship, you’re not going to win it.”

 

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  • http://twitter.com/kwtrnka Keith Trnka

    I’ve only taught the regular semester once, but when I was a grad student I taught several summer classes.  I prefer teaching the summer classes.  The class size is smaller, we meet for longer sessions, and the students actually find the time to do assignments (unless they have a summer job).  Then again, I’m talking about a 10-week summer session compared to maybe 14-week regular.  I’ve done a 4-5-week winter term once and it was too dense for anything but very basic intro classes.

    To answer the specific questions – I felt that students were more motivated during the summer (on average) and I was able to cover most (but not all) of the material, mostly because I lose so much time in 50-minute periods during the regular term compared to 90ish-minute summer periods.

  • drj50

    I taught six semester hours of a beginning classical language in six weeks (three hours a day). It was a great experience in many ways. Students were very focused — or dropped. The biggest challenge was keeping their confidence up and I did a lot of encouraging. In a cumulative, skills-oriented course, there was no time for students to develop confidence about any particular area before adding three more. They were much better than they felt that they were. Relationships were great (almost like a hostage situation!). Years later, a number of them are still good friends.

  • iriselina

    Hi,
    Good to hear this.I taught  a 6-week summer course for 26 yrs, as also regular courses , and even after 4yrs of retirement have been invited to do so.I just finished the course yesterday, the 2nd after I retired.
    Yes, students are more focussed, the library is all theirs, nothing else happens which would make demands on them and they are totally immersed in my teaching and their responses. An excellent programme. I heartily recommend it to all especially for the learning of languages.

  • zbautista

     I agree about students retention during Summer course, but is too much to cover in a little time, many students got frustration. I taught Summer course for three yrs.

             Zoila Bautista

  • mlhodge

    Student loans DO cover summer school classes; that’s how I paid for my first summer of graduate school in 2009.

  • http://twitter.com/JosephJEsposito Joseph Esposito

    I would not characterize my view as “more traditional,”  Myemphasis is on business strategy.  That’s very different from productstrategy.  If you don’t have to worry about finding a market, you cando just about anything.  All of the stuff on Mark Sample’s blog iscongenial to me.  One of the virtues of the old-fashioned books andjournals is that people are willing to pay for them.  One of theproblems with Web 2.0 scholarship is that virtually no one is willingto pay for it.  So this is not traditional vs. the new.  This is twodifferent elements of the matrix, both of which must be resolved.

  • mbelvadi

    I encourage the members of the AAUP to look closely at the new library-purchasing phenomenon known by the names “patron driven acquisition” (PDA) or “demand driven acquisition” (DDA).  If you aren’t making your books available in ebook format, or aren’t allowing them to be included in PDA/DDA programs, you are going to miss out on a lot of revenue, as we all know that a very important part of the scholarly book market is academic library purchases.

  • amsterdamup

    I fully agree with Esposito’s reaction: where does the money come from in an Open Access environment? To our opinion, the guiding principles for scholarly communication should be: 1. research and the dissemination of results belong together. 2. Funders’ OA policies should include OA publishing and 3. publishers should develop OA publishing as a service to the scholarly community. This last principle is already evolving in the STM journals/articles world, where an author can chose for OA after his/her publication is accepted through peer-review, if he/she pays for it up front. This ‘authors pay system’ used in STM for the publication of journals and articles should also be introduced in the HSS, where the monograph is the most common way of disseminating the results of the research. Special attention is recommended for Open Access for scholarly monographs, in particular in relation to the Humanities and Social Sciences. There is a clear need for Open Access publishing and funding models for monographs to bridge the gap with OA articles, but also because the traditional business model for books is losing its sustainability. Finally, not the author, but the funders of research should take care of the costs for the Open Access edition as the dissemination of research should be seen as part of the research, but also because they are already taking care of most of the costs of scientific publications through the library budgets. This is the way our major scientific funding organisation NWO looks at it since 2009, and I believe it is also the way the EU is moving. Amsterdam University Press/ Saskia C.J. de Vries
    Finally, not the author, but the funders of research should take care of the costs for the Open Access edition as the dissemination of research should be seen as part of the research, but also because they are already taking care of most of the costs of scientific publications through the library budgets. This is the way our major scientific funding organisation NWO looks at it since 2009, and I believe it is also the way the EU is moving. Amsterdam University Press/ Saskia C.J. de Vries
     

  • missoularedhead

    You’d think 8 years of bar/restaurant experience, including management, all thru grad school would count as the ‘right skill set’!

  • ovpstaff

    NCAA has yet to weigh in, so there is every chance that OSU will see USC-like sanctions. This report is about the results of OSU’s own investigation and self-imposed hand-slapping.

  • jffoster

    Depends on what you think “the mission”  (is there only one?) of higher education is. 

  • robert_wyatt

    I didn’t know tattoo palors made so much money.

  • goxewu

    Right. We tend to forget that part of the mission of big public universities is to provide entertainment spectacles (formerly, on, as I recall Prof. Foster’s paean, “crisp autumn Satuday afternoons,” but now every day and night of the week) to a bunch of beer-sodden potbellied people who can’t spell “bachelor’s degree” but who live in the area of the college stadium and like to dress up in the school’s colors, to millions of people with cable TV who watch sports 24-7, and, last but not least, the bookmakers in Las Vegas and elsewhere. Ooops! I forgot that another part of the mission of these schools is to provide admission to college for underqualified students, burden them with 40+  hours a week spent on their sport, furnish them with multiple concussions (not just those “He jus’ got his bell rung” causes of time outs, but the ordinary occurence in line play) and wreck their knees, and then turn them loose in the world ungraduated or with diplomas in such as “Recreation Administration” and “Leisure Studies.”

  • jffoster

    “beer sodden” only among the lower classes.  But for those with class it’s bourbon burdened, or maybe bourbon imbibben, and in the deep South  rum ridden.  

  • weberatou

    In  light of so many recent atrocious decisions by the NCAA, this is an opportunity to demonstrate it is serious about large-scale transgressions.  However, the NCAA seems to have unlimited abiolity to snatch defe3at from the jaws of victory in situations like this.

  • goxewu

    1. What’s displayed in my previous comment is not “vitriol” but sarcasm.

    2. My objection is not to the connection between sports and nationalism, but to the disconnect between the legitimate mission of a big public university and that university’s running a semi-autonomous, largely irrelevant sports entertainment enterprise.

    3. The tongue-in-cheek proposal concerning porn is meant to emphasize (2), above, by means of another, even more obviously irrelevant and counter-to-the-legitimate-mission entertainment enterprise a big public university might run–because the resources (“coeds” instead of “studs”) would be about the same–to get publicity and make money.

    4. There more than enough “bad eggs” in big public universities’ revenue sports programs to justify characterizing them with “broad brush strokes.” That the majority of ‘student-athletes” (more like athlete-students) don’t actually acquire criminal records or have grades falsified while they’re playing is about as reassuring as saying, “The majority of policemen in our department are not corrupt.”

    5. There’s an increasing amount of handwriting on the walls of big-time college sports–even in an environment where the billions (yes, billions!) of dollars at stake militate against investigations and penalities: USC, Ohio State, Tennessee–National and conference championships being nullified, bowl victories (but not the money from them!) being given back, a Heisman Trophy all but physically confiscated, etc. And these corruptions are what make the news; meanwhile the corrupt-by-its-nature “one and done” phenomenon of future NBA players making token appearances as freshmen (who don’t really have to perform as students during their “cup of coffee” at college) on big-time college teams is now accepted without a peep. (They can’t–pace Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, et al.–go to the NBA directly from high school because they’re just not, um, “mature” enough. Mind you, they could enlist in the military and go to war, or get an ordinary job, directly from high school. So “mature” is patent bulls**t. The real reason as that if these don’t-want-to-be-in-college-college-”students” went pro immediately, the entertainment quality of college basketball would suffer and the attendance and TV ratings and the money therefrom would decrease.)

    6. You want a broad brushstroke? How’s this: Big-time college revenue sports are a seething, smelly, cauldron of corruption whose repulsiveness has come to be overlooked because it entertains the yahoos and fills a lot of pockets with a lot of money.

    7. This “crisp autumn Saturday afternoon,” “these kids,” “oh, maybe a few bad apples,” are, simply put, a delusion left over from the 1940s and ’50s.

    8. If there’s time, I might comment further on arrest records. But a 2007 Sports Illustrated report (strongly objected to, of course, by the NCAA) might serve as a tide-me-over.

  • goxewu

    “This is my last comment, higher education has many serious problems in this country, athletics is not one of them.”

    Thus is completed the view from Mars.

     

  • Socratease2

    Exactly, I am offering you a far-reaching and beyond-global perspective to consider as a counter-point to your argument. I have still not read one word from anyone that spells out in a clear cause-effect model how athletics negatively impacts the education received at an American university. I see people spinning out of orbit but perhaps one day I will read a cogent thought on the topic. Until then…

  • marklarson

    old saying: Asian countries put human waste in their agricultural fields, North Americans put it in their drinking water…

  • old nassau’67

    To
    address the first four Mr. Kantrowitz’s myths: (for 15 years, I taught SAT Prep at
    two Georgia high schools)

    1.
    “Only straight- “A” students win scholarships”.
    Obviously: any recruited athlete, many with barely passing HS grades,
    gets a complete college scholarship.

    2.
    “…White students are actually disproportionately likely to win
    awards”. “Disproportionately” by what criterion?
    Population percentage? How about SAT + GPA, the usual requirement for
    (non-athletic, aka academic) financial aid? If whites are, say, 40%
    of the population, but 75% of applicants with over 3.5 GPA and 2000
    SAT, and receive three of four scholarships, is that result
    “disproportionate”?

    3.
    “My child will get a full-ride scholarship” Not if you make
    too much $$. Scholarships independent of/from family income are few.

    4.
    “Only athletes win scholarships: Only a small fraction of
    institutional aid is awarded based on athletics”. Two questions.
    (1) If 75 football players receive $50,000/ yr. free rides, and,
    let’s say, the other 10,000 scholarship students receive their $2500,
    then yes: the football players, with their lower academic numbers,
    get about one-eighth in this hypothetical example. (2) “Institutional aid”.
    Many colleges’ athletic departments’ finances are completely
    separate, from donations, ticket receipts, alumni giving to salaries,
    scholarships, and facilities. By the way, The University of
    Georgia, for example, has 26,000 undergrads – and the Athletic
    Department has its own website.

  • akprof

    Athletic depts often have their own websites because they sell things – hence they have to have .com websites rather than .edu websites.

  • mbelvadi

    This list was going well until we hit #9. From the answer given, “…most try to ensure..at least some…” it is clear that in fact this “myth” is quite true that other aid is indeed “reduced” at least somewhat.  It’s too bad that authors of lists seem to think that every interesting list of anything has to have exactly 10 entries (“the top ten xyz”), even if you don’t really have 10 of your topic.

  • raza_khan

    I am not sure what was the purpose of the article when the “scholarship” is broadly defined…. Are we talking about academic merit based scholarship?  Of course then prom outfit out of duct tape would not qualify!!!  Are we talking about scholarship for certain majors?  atheletic based scholarship?    So,  first, the kinds of scholarships neeed to be defined and then myths taken out of those scholarships… So if I can get a merit based scholarship for coming up with best prom dress out of duct tape,  I am all ears!!!

    Raza

    __________________________

    Dr. Raza Khan

    Dr.Raza.Khan@gmail.com

  • dpn33

    Hey, OldNassau’67, even Princeton University Athletics has its own website, and they are hardly a sports powerhouse. I’m not quite sure why that last sentence is even there. It’s irrelevant.

    This whole article comes off as an extended ad for Mr. Kantrowitz’s website.

  • texasmusic

    I think the purpose of the article was to say there are many kinds of scholarships available (yes, even the kind where someone contributes to your tuition when you submit a winning duct-tape prom dress design).  This is typical of the kinds of articles you see about this time of year, when high school seniors are starting to get serious about college.  It encourages people to get creative and not to assume they’re out of luck before they even begin.

  • texasmusic

    And on that note – I was really hoping for some good news with number 6: that scholarships are not just for high school seniors.  Evidently they’re just for high school seniors and younger, and maybe some college freshmen.  I was really hoping to hear about a “starting-over” scholarship for the non-traditional adult students. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000421945279 Fe Fo

    Scholarship are not only merit based, but having a good GPA and academic background is a must to getting in school and paying for it. However, you don’t have to be a 3.0-4.0 student to receive a scholarship. I received several scholarships during my undergraduate and kept a 2.5. to maintain them. I think some people also over think academics, if you are a well rounded student; involved in school activities, sports and so on, it also make you look like a better candidate because you have to posse structure to be involved with school activities. Some of these people comments below are broken down by what the article said, however, I still agree with most of their tips and don’t think their is one straight narrow path to getting and keeping a scholarship And I have worked in financial aid and scholarship for seven years.

  • hhopf

    oldnassau67, not all athletic scholarships go to football players, and the list is correct that most athletes do not get a “full ride.”   At my institution, many of the women’s athletic scholarships go unfilled, because the athletes choose to accept instead an academic scholarship (from the institution as well) that covers more of their educational costs.  And our athletes (as is the norm) as a group have a higher GPA than that of the overall student body.

  • darccity

    These are not the important myths about scholarships. The real myth is that outside scholarship money is even an appreciable fraction of all financial assistance! It definitely is not! Parents need to stop pressuring their teens to spend any time searching out and applying for scholarships. It prevents them from achieving the grades and doing the extracurric activities that will earn them the real aid to the places they want to get into.

    The primary source of financial aid is when the college itself offers you a price reduction in its full-price sticker tuition rate. Increasingly, the basis for such aid is student quality or particular needs of the college to balance its incoming class. My daughter was once offered a huge amount to attend Sarah Lawrence — a college noted for low financial aid offers — because they wanted her badly (and it wasn’t because of her class standing). On the other hand, needs based aid is declining rapidly.

    Now the other big myth is that student loans is financial aid. Can you imagine a slimy used car dealer telling you he’ll get you financial aid, and it turns out to be a loan?! Only colleges can get away with such double speak.

  • mkant69

    The popularity of top ten lists may have more to do with alliteration (both top and ten begin with the letter T) and ten being a small number than anything else. Top twelve, top two, and top three are popular for similar reasons. People do not necessarily pad the list with additional items to get to ten. They might use a different number and just omit the word “top”. In this particular case a 20-minute time limit for the talk required cutting the number of myths to 10.

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