Covering College Costs

How can you cover the costs of a college education other than taking out loans? Here's a short list -- grants, savings, work earnings, monetary gifts, and scholarships. Most of the information on this website will help you learn about scholarships. But getting a scholarship takes planning, organization, hard work, and more hard work. Like building the tower in Luke 14:28, it takes lots of planning, even years of planning in advance. What if you don't have "years"? Do you have a year? Most scholarship applications are due in March or April of your senior year of high school. Pay close attention to the due dates. But don't put off your applications. Just because you send it by the due date doesn't mean you'll be OK. Think about it an opposite way. Look for the opening date for applications. Many scholarships like the Charley Wooten Scholarship open on a certain date. This scholarship awards $5 million to Texas residents and another $1 million to students outside of Texas. The fine print states that the scholarship committee will only open applications until they've given out all the scholarship money. It's kind of like first come first served. So applicants who wait until the due date have a slim chance of the committee even opening their applications. Like in so many other areas of life, when considering college and scholarships it pays to plan ahead and not wait until the last minute.