There are many ways to receive free, borrowed, or earned money for college. Some ways to achieve this are by filling out the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) and applying for scholarships.
The FAFSA is an opportunity to earn grants, loans, or work-study. Grants are free aid, meaning they don’t need to be paid back, loans are borrowed money that needs to be paid back over several years; and work-study is money you earn by being employed by your school during the academic year.
“Students receive their financial aid offers from their campuses based on completion of the FAFSA,” Kristin Natzke, an SHS counselor, said.
The FAFSA was opened for completion in December. Although there is no deadline to complete it, each college campus will have a priority deadline that you need to meet in order to take full advantage of the money they have to offer from the Federal Government.
“If you are going into postsecondary education, you should definitely complete the FAFSA to determine if you qualify for any [financial] aid from the Federal Government,” Natzke said. “You never want to leave any free money on the table if it’s out there.”
SHS senior Hannah Saari recently filled out the FAFSA and said it was very simple to complete.
“Filling out the FAFSA form wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be. It took me around 30 minutes to do my part,” Saari said.
The only problem she ran into was the website being temporarily down for the first week the FAFSA was open, and it didn’t come back at the time it was scheduled to.
“That part was very frustrating, but actually filling it out was pretty effortless,” Saari said. “I thought it was going to ask a lot of specific questions, but it asked mostly basic questions that had easily accessible answers. It mainly asks questions about your family and home life.”
Although the FAFSA is relatively easy to complete, it can have some technical issues if filled out incorrectly. SHS senior Grace Oettel experienced these difficulties. She had filled out the student section before her mom filled out the corresponding parent section, which ended up locking her mom out of her account.
“[The FAFSA] wouldn’t let her change her password or anything,” Oettel said. “She called and asked how she should fix the problem, so they changed her password on their side, but it still didn’t work.”
After about a week, they called again, successfully got the password changed, and were able to finish filling out the form.
Although you might run into some slight issues, the FAFSA is worth completing if you wish to receive financial aid for post-high school education.
Scholarships are also a great way to earn money. They all differ in completion time, requirement of an essay, and amount of money available to obtain. Any amount of money you can receive is helpful towards tuition, as the cost per semester has increased significantly in past years. Although you are not guaranteed to win every scholarship you apply for, the possible money makes them worth filling out.
There is a newsletter sent out to seniors every month during the school year with available scholarships. Our SHS counselors suggest filling those out if you’re applicable!