One of Charlie Munger’s beloved aphorisms is to “fish where the fish are.” It doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to succeed, but you’re much more likely to succeed than trying to fish anywhere else.
When it comes to college scholarships, there’s a cliche so old it’s practically an antique: apply for as many scholarships as possible, no matter the amount, because every little bit helps to make college affordable.
I don’t know the origin of this conventional wisdom, but it’s so banal I’m not even going to bother to disagree with it (though I think high school students have better things to be doing than applying for $50 scholarships from their local credit union). Instead, I’m going to suggest an alternate approach.
Think like a grant applicant
When the federal government wants to research the causes of diabetes, it sends out a request for proposals for research into the causes of diabetes. All the nation’s diabetes researchers submit their proposals, and the federal government selects the most promising proposals to fund.
There’s nothing you can do about the amount of money appropriated for diabetes research, which determines the number of proposals accepted. What you can focus on is the one thing you can control: being a diabetes researcher with a compelling research proposal. That’s because no matter how much money is appropriated, only diabetes researchers are going to be approved to receive it.
The same logic applies to receiving student aid: become the kind of person who receives student aid, and you’re much more likely to receive it.
Research government funded educational programs: that’s where the money is
Let’s start with an easy one. Everyone knows that low-income college students are eligible for federal Pell grants. But did you know there’s a second low-income college scholarship program, the Supplemental Education Opportunity Grant? The catch is, not every institution participates in SEOG — to receive a grant, you need to attend a participating institution. Unfortunately, 20 minutes of searching didn’t yield an official list of participating programs, which means you’ll need to check each institution you’re interested in individually. Searching for the institution’s name and “FSEOG” or “SEOG” typically works, although you can also call the financial aid office and ask directly.
Now let’s take it one step further. The Department of Education also runs a competition to award Foreign Language and Area Studies, or FLAS, grants to undergraduates studying “modern foreign languages and related area or international studies.” To receive a FLAS grant, you need to be studying a foreign language at a school that receives FLAS funding. It’s no good to study foreign language anywhere else, and it’s no good to study anything else at a FLAS school. Fortunately, a list of 2014-2018 FLAS schools is available online.
Finally, there are entire educational programs funded by the federal government. To continue the example of foreign language training, the federal government, at great expense, has created undergraduate language fluency programs in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi Urdu, Korean, Persian, Portugese, Russian, Swahili and Turkish. Note that while the programs are generously federally funded, they don’t include scholarships for undergraduate students. That brings me back to the first point above: think like a grant recipient. The programs themselves don’t have to include undergraduate scholarships, but if you can enter a language flagship program suddenly you become the work product of the grant applicants, which means they have an incentive to see you succeed, whether that means writing letters of recommendation, finding scholarship funding, or providing work-study opportunities.
I’ve been using examples from foreign language studies since that’s my own background, but opportunities exist in other fields as well: do you know about the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program? You have to attend one of the 151 participating institutions to participate.
Conclusion
My readers already know that you don’t need “scholarships” to go to college for free: you just need to have a low enough income and attend a school that promises to meet your full financial need with grant aid. If you’ve decided to have a high income, or decide to attend a school that expects you to contribute to the cost of your tuition, then it may make sense to pursue scholarships. But if you’re going to do so, you’re going to have much more luck going from big to small than vice versa. And when it comes to “big,” there are no deeper pockets than Uncle Sam’s. Start there.
Another reason why the Govt shouldnt be in the business of passing out “scholarship” money ie wasting tax dollars. Not only does it inflate higher education costs by flooding the market w easy money to attend school, their litmus test for givng these grants are monetary based not educational excellence based.
Right. Because it doesn’t make sense to offer higher education to those who can’t afford it. We only need to educate the wealthy. And the millions and millions of dollars that go into individual college level sports programs from private sources are no match, I’m certain, for the money from the federal government.
Some of the best institutions of higher learning in the world are funded primarily by the governments of the countries in which they are located. Students in the EU can attend universities and colleges that are in other EU countries, for a steeply discounted amount, because of generally low costs for higher education, and reciprocity among the member nations.
The biggest issues with colleges and universities do not include the government “flooding” the market with funds. They are inconsistency in admission standards, and a shift AWAY from government backing of colleges. Not every student can be an A student. But if the admission standards are rigorous enough, and the student maintains a 2.0 or better, that should suffice.
In my state, when I was a student, the cost of an undergraduate education at our excellent land grant university (I’m a graduate) was funded more than 50% by the state, and the rest by tuition. Today, the state funds 15%, and the students pick up the rest. Inflation, of course, creates an enormous burden on those whose families cannot afford to either pay outright, or take out loans for them.
Your comment is a fine example of the old adage, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Higher education should, if one learns to THINK, not just to compute, teach one to analyze things and tease out the grays from the black and the white. It’s a shame, really, that so many lack that essential skill.
Allowing the Federal Govt to flood the market with easy money loans inflates the entire cost of tuition. Therefore outpricing most people. Who is thinking its a great idea to get 150-200k in debt for a public school education? Everyone isnt meant for college/university. Just because the govt will hand out money to ppl w/o means to attend college doesnt mean its a good idea. Your insult seems petty and off the mark.
MickiSue, having spent 9 years as a consumer of higher education, I can assure you, it’s greatest contribution is not actually in education but in holding one’s self accountable, and in providing accreditation.
Otherwise, it’s just a very pleasant experience. Is that also “deserved”? How far are we to take that line of reasoning?
If you are able to divorce the fun experiential aspect of college from the education, then you must ask yourself, couldn’t the good that you’re advocating also be done in a more efficient and more effective manner? And are the other ways to invest in your egalitarian sentiment and the education of 18-22 year olds?
I ask because the economics that people like SumOfItAll are advocating sound dismissive, but also come from a good place. On the surface, it looks like everybody deserves to have a fair shot, be educated, and the our whole society benefits from smarter, well-rounded people. But we do have limits on what that can cost. And, in the past these limits have been couple to the property taxes of what the local community can afford. Should the federal government come in and usurp funding for lower education too?
MickiSue, I am not against some federal spending on higher education, but it seems more effective to serve young adults by enriching the pathways to demonstrating their worth and achievement, rather than funneling them through spoonfeeding programs. We already have plenty of sources of “free” education that are not scarcity-based (Khan, MIT OCW, Coursera, Wikis, public libraries, the list goes on and on), but we could define new ways of demonstrating it’s learned rather than paying professors to repeat the same thing year after year. That kind of solution only inflates prices and enriches the pockets of academics.
I very much disagree with you. The use of the phrasing, “flooding the market with easy market loans” is facile and doesn’t begin to address the issues around higher education.
I’m not quite sure what point you are trying to make, but let’s go with what you have stated. While it is true that some people use higher education for other reasons than to get educated, that is not the fault of the system, but of the user.
My experiences with higher education were different from yours; I obtained a BA in philosophy, learning to think and parse arguments logically in the process, and a degree in nursing, learning human anatomy, physiology and the emotional and psychological ramifications for people who interact with the healthcare system.
The point that I am making is that there must be a way to allow those with the intelligence and drive to become educated. It is a good to society, and harmful to do the opposite: to require that individuals personally or familialy meet income standards to do so.
To dismiss the idea that government funding for education is a net good is to miss the point of education. And to ignore the evidence, all over the world, that societal support, in the form of government subsidy, for education allows for a better society is to be willfully blind.
1) Stand back, I know what I’m doing: I studied medicine at Khan Academy! Or civil engineering. Or any other of innumerable fields on which society requires something more than screen time.
God help us.
2) If we can afford for the Pentagon to disappear 6 trillion dollars without qualms, we could have afforded a lot more higher education spending.
Thanks, Mr. Engineer! It’s not that it’s impossible to obtain a degree without acquiring useful skills. I was a FINE waitress with my Philosophy degree. Although knowing how to use logic for fun and profit is a skill that many, even those with STEM degrees, might think about learning.
But as you noted, medicine, engineering, also any other health profession you’d like to mention requires real attention to the subject matter, as well as practice in the field.
Archeology? Pretty such that that requires attention to subject matter and practice in the field, as well. Along with many, many other degree programs.
The fact that one CAN spend many years in academia without acquiring actual marketable skills does not mean that it’s the rule.
Precisely my point. Accreditation is what’s required. Right now it’s coupled to education, but it need not be. Decoupling regularly fruits many efficiencies. MickiSue’s acquired logical thinking appears to miss my premise entirely.
And how does one acquire accreditation, in the most efficient manner possible, outside of being educated?
At present University programs (“degrees not institutions”) are accredited by ABET, which conveys significance to both students and employers, and which allows the degrees granted to carry some measure of quality. That quality metric is rather binary (the program is ABET-accredited, or not). That’s a rather poor solution, but it’s what we have.
Otherwise there is some signaling that occurs that may convey the individual student’s character, skill, and functional education: university brand, course selection, GPA, completed projects/works, thesis, and co-ops. Many professions also “encourage” (require) an additional test/licensing to signify competence of the individual rendering the person a professional engineer, CPA, board-accredited doctor, etc.
I am suggesting that in addition to, or instead of, the existing pathways to develop and demonstrate excellence, we create more pathways. The intent to be inclusive and diverse — not to *add* to the already absurd amount of degree-creep that is already out there.
Additional pathways would mean more supply and competition with existing programs, which in of itself will incur efficiency in existing institutions (i.e., make them cheaper). Alternate pathways will likely lead to additional efficiency in time, while maintain quality.
One example alternate pathway would permit some students to be self-taught or to exercise a “Montessori-style” learning without the typical brick & mortar costs, instructor-led pacing, and academic bloat of normal institutions. Examinations could be universal (as they are in lower education), or not.
We see some of this happening with on-line/hybrid programs like University of Phoenix, and a number of traditional Universities looking to cash in on their brand (and in all cases, I’d argue the education is currently subpar, but won’t stay that way).
The key though will happen when we start separating out the exams, and creating new quantitative and qualitative measures for people to convey their knowledge and skill. This can be accelerated when some large companies like IBM, Boeing, Intel start hiring from the non-Universities. Obviously, some institutions like Medicine are more immune to a decentralized form of learning — and it is those that will continue to be a bad deal (well for aspiring doctors, not nurses).
Regardless, disruption is coming — it’s just a question of whether the federal government encourages it by artificially raising the cost of Universities, or encourages it by funding and/or defining new pathways. The only difference is how much and for how long the impoverished student has to shell out cash to pompous academics and ungrateful bankers that are getting risk-free loans (that cannot be forgiven even after bankruptcy).