How Many Scholarships Should I Apply For and How to Avoid Student Loans?

One major consideration for a student who is graduating is the cost of college tuition. Financial aid such as scholarships exist to help with college expenses, easing the financial burden and giving a student more options. If you know how scholarships work, the next important question that would enter our mind would be: "How many scholarships should I apply for?"

How Many Scholarships Should a Student Apply For?

The last thing you'd want as a college student is to graduate and already be in debt for thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands worth in student loans. And if you know how scholarships work - they're basically free money given to students applying for and in college to help with college costs.

Therefore, given unlimited time and resources, you should apply for as many scholarships as you are able to.

However, everything is not as straightforward since every scholarship you apply to will require some time - from preparing the requirements, filling out forms, answering any questionnaires, writing essays, and so on. Some take hours of time to complete. This does not even include the scholarship search time. And it's likely that in your senior year in high school, you'll also be busy with the college admission process such as sending out applications for the colleges that you want to enter and taking entrance exams and essays. Then there's of course still school stuff you have to take care of. So, you have to be smart and organized about sending out your scholarship applications, while sending out as many as you can.

You Need Not Wait for Your Senior Year in High School

One major thing you need to know is that you need not wait until your senior year in high school before you start looking for scholarship opportunities. Here are some scholarships that are available for high school juniors. As much as possible, make sure that the summer before your high school senior year, you have already researched and made a list of the scholarships you want to apply to along with the requirements they have.

Scholarship Application Deadlines Are Important

You need to be aware of certain deadlines for scholarships depending on when you plan to start college, when you need the scholarship, and which scholarships you apply to. There is not one single month where all application deadlines fall, though many are September through May. Here is a list of scholarship application deadlines by month. Losing track of the application deadline of a scholarship you really wanted and needed may cost you

Scholarship Availability is Not Always Constant

One last thing to encourage you to go after as many scholarships as you can is because the amount of some scholarship dollars or even availability may change at certain periods, or may not stay constant from year-to-year or even semester-to-semester. So you'll want to secure yourself and get as much scholarship money as you can. 

Find a Way to Apply for Scholarships Faster in 5 Days and Maximize Your Time

Does the scholarship process sound stressful and time-consuming? We have a 5-Day Scholarship Accelerator program designed to make the scholarship application process simpler and more organized for you, and ultimately make it a repetitive process that allows you to maximize the number of scholarship applications you can send out. All it takes is 30 minutes of effort a day, for 5 days. You are given advice from scholarship experts and judges as to what should and shouldn't be put in your application and essay, also increasing your odds of submitting a winning application.

How Do I Get My Scholarship Money?

Scholarship and other student financial aid money are used towards paying for the cost of attendance of a student in a college or university. These can either be a one time check or are renewable and can be obtained every school year or semester. These are either given to the school's financial department where the student will study or directly to the student who should then use these to pay for college costs and report all financial aid to the school.

What Are the Kinds of Student Aid I Can Get?

Basically you can get student loans, grants and scholarships to help you with your college cost of attendance. Private or federal student loans are the last thing you want to incur since you'll end up having to pay for these once you graduate. Grants are money given by the government or private institutions based usually on financial need or income. Scholarships are more flexible as anyone can apply for them depending on the type of scholarships applicable to you. Therefore, it is wise to get as many scholarships and grants as they are free money that covers your college cost of attendance and reduces or removes your need to end up in debt because of student loans.

One thing to note is you can attempt to look for and get a full-ride scholarship, which pays for the entire cost of attendance for college. This removes the need to apply for any other financial aid.

What is Included in the Cost of Attendance?

Basically, the total amount of student financial aid at schools that you receive in the form of scholarships, grants, and student loans cannot exceed the total amount that is needed to pay for your college cost of attendance. As defined by congress, the cost of attendance is the average cost for one academic year of college. This includes college tuition, fees, books, supplies, room and board, transportation, and other expenses related to your college studies.

Where Do I Look in My Scholarship Search?

There are many sources to aid you in scholarship searching. You can use online scholarship directories and search tools like Scholarships.com and Fastweb.com. Aside from scholarship search tools, they even provide scholarship matching services. You can ask your school guidance counselor for scholarship ideas or resources. Next are the admissions or financial aid office of the colleges you plan to apply to. Then, you can look at state and federal government agencies for available grants or scholarships. Lastly, you can look for foundations, organizations and private groups and individuals that provide scholarships. Many kinds of scholarships are out there and it is not a stretch to say thousands of scholarships exist.

The main goal is to apply for as many scholarships as you can and get as much scholarship funds as you can so that your school costs for college or cost of attendance is covered and you can avoid student loan payments as much as possible.

Can I Apply For Too Many Scholarships?

We have said throughout this article that your scholarship hunt should include as many scholarships as possible. Once you have your target colleges to attend, compute your estimated cost of attendance for those colleges, and then start thinking of scholarship strategies where the scholarships you obtain would cover these costs as much as possible, if not all. Do not limit yourself to just one scholarship provider or just a few, especially since it's possible you may be competing with thousands of students for those. Set a reasonable goal or timeline as to how many scholarships you want to send out per week based on how many scholarships you want to apply to and how much time it takes to apply for one.

Avoid applying to scholarships that do not fit you, for example, a certain group that provides scholarships to students with cancer or state or regional scholarships where you are not a resident of that state or the school you will be attending is not in that state or region.

Remember that the total amount of scholarship money cannot exceed the total costs for school or cost of attendance for the college you are attending. Scholarship money also lessens the amount of federal aid in grants or any aid that the school would provide to you once your total cost of attendance is met. So while plenty of scholarships will definitely help, having too much may just make you waste your time if the total amount you will be receiving including grants already cover your entire cost of attendance.

How Do I Get Organized In My Scholarship Applications?

With college costs and tuition constantly increasing, the pressure for students to apply for as many scholarships as possible is there, especially when they are finding it difficult to get one or they are in financial need. Therefore, in scholarship hunting, it is very important to be as organized as possible, while at the same time minimizing the amount of time you spend on each application.

Organization is important so that you not only have a clear list on which scholarships you want to apply to and when, but at the same time keep track of each of their status, requirements, deadlines, and scholarship amounts. This prevents you from losing track of how much more you need to cover the cost of attendance plus also submitting incomplete requirements and missing important deadlines. We have a Digital Organizer that may help you with keeping your scholarship application data neatly organized.

We previously also mentioned our 5-Day Scholarship Accelerator program, designed to make the scholarship application process faster, simpler and more organized for you. This helps with minimizing the time you spend on each application. But even better, we also offer an Ultimate Scholarship Success Pack, which combines our Digital Organizer and 5-Day Scholarship Accelerator, Personalized Search, and Admissions In An Hour programs to give you a very comprehensive scholarship assistance to help speed up your scholarship applications while at the same time making sure you find the right scholarships for you and your applications are completed properly. This helps you confidently handle the scholarship process and also helps make sure you don't miss any requirements or deadlines.