They don’t carry the cash or cachet of a Fulbright or Rhodes, but there are hundreds of local scholarships that are easier to come by and can help make a dent in the high cost of college.
Neighborhood banks, labor unions, women’s clubs, the Lions Club and scores of similar organizations commonly award students $500 or $1,000. Often, the award is a one-time gift when a student enters college; other scholarships are renewed annually as the student progresses through school.
With the tab for tuition, room and board well into five figures at most schools, some students and their families may think such small-potato awards are not worth pursuing.
“I hand out more applications than get turned in,” relates John Ruby, chairman of the guidance department of Proviso West High School in Hillside. “Some people say the applications look too complicated.”
On the other hand, says Marybeth Kravets, guidance counselor at Deerfield High School, “this year, with the way the economy was, we had a lot of interest in finding money.”
Supplemental money
The local scholarships are meant to be a fill-in, to provide a little extra to students who probably are already receiving more substantial state and federal financial aid, and scholarship money from their college, says Jim Soderstrom, assistant director of the George M. Pullman Educational Foundation, a Chicago organization that awards scholarships to Cook County residents and provides seminars on finding scholarship money.
The adage about nothing ventured, nothing gained aptly applies. “I tell students,” says Peg Fischer, guidance counselor at Addison Trail High School in Addison, “`If you can get $500, isn’t it worth an hour of your time?”‘
Tracy Irwin, who graduated from Deerfield High this June and will attend Emory University in Atlanta this fall, proves that a little investment in time can pay off. She is receiving three local scholarships, for a total of $3,500. Irwin says, “My friends ask me, `How did you get all these scholarships?”‘
Irwin doesn’t have any secret. She’s just taking advantage of the offerings of the school’s guidance department. “I went to the college and career resource center, and I found out about all the scholarships there. They have a computer program and you can input your religion, the sports you have been in, your academics, your special interests, and the computer spits out all these scholarship opportunities.”
Deerfield High School is somewhat unusual, says Kravets, in that a parent volunteer has added local scholarship opportunities to the school’s software database that compiles national awards and scholarships. At many high schools, students can use a computer to search for national awards, but the local scholarships are posted on bulletin boards and published in newsletters.
Program access
But all of the Chicago schools, says Joanna Hosteny, guidance counselor at Whitney Young High School, have access to a computer program that provides help for both college- and work-bound students. That software does contain some local scholarships, says Hosteny, because it was created for use in Illinois.
At Montini Catholic High in Lombard, “once a month, we publish every scholarship that we are aware of,” says guidance counselor Jim Kavanaugh.
Local scholarships can come and go from year to year, observes Ruby of Proviso West, because local clubs don’t always have the funds to award one each year. High school counselors estimate that between 25 and 30 local scholarships cross their desk each year.
How many kids end up competing for each local prize? At Addison Trail High School, Fischer estimates that “we have about 40 applicants for each award, but many of the applicants are applying for several of the scholarships.”
Typically, a student has to demonstrate his academic prowess through a combination of good test scores and grades to qualify for one of the scholarships. Most of the awards, says Kravets, look at a combination of need and achievement.
Some scholarships, though, are aimed at students with a more unusual profile. “The Deerfield Lions Club indicates that its scholarship should go to a student who has overcome an obstacle-a death in the family, a learning disability or other handicap,” says Kravets.
In Addison, says Fischer, a local family stipulates that the winner of its annual scholarship be a student with a grade-point average no higher than 3.0 (out of 4.0) who is planning to attend the area community college, in this case the College of Du Page in Glen Ellyn.
And sometimes winning depends not only on what you know but where you came from. “There are a number of ethnic scholarships, sponsored by organizations that stipulate that the recipient be of that ethnicity,” says Judith Alexander, guidance counselor at St. Scholastica High School in Chicago.
The best way to find out about local scholarships, say counselors, is to check in regularly with the school guidance office. The awards come through the pipeline all year long, says Ruby, so it’s best to make regular checks.
Although guidance counselors receive notice of many awards, some organizations don’t send notice of their awards to the local high school, notes Alexander. That’s why she tells St. Scholastica students to check with their own employer, their parents’ employer, any labor unions they belong to and with their local ward if they live in Chicago. Some banks offer scholarships that they publicize in their lobbies and in customer literature, says Alexander.
Some students even position themselves to snare an award. “We have a lot of kids apply to work at Jewel Food Stores so that they can apply for one of the scholarships Jewel offers its employees,” says Alexander.
Be wary of mail deals
Counselors adamantly stress, though, that parents and students should resist pitches to send in money to find out about awards. The information being sold concerns national scholarships, and information about those is commonly available from the school guidance office.
Counselors also recommend checking books such as “Don’t Miss Out” by Robert and Anna Leider, published by Octameron Press each year, and “Scholarships, Fellowships and Loans,” published annually by Gale Research Inc.
“You can see ads in the convenience stores and in papers at the checkout aisle promising that if you send in money you can capture some of the millions of dollars in college aid that go unclaimed every year,” says Soderstrom. “My evaluation is that most of these ads are quite deceptive.”
Kravets agrees: “If you read the very small print, you will see that it says the money-back guarantee only applies if you apply for all of the 2,000 scholarships. And the scholarships are no different from the ones students could find in our database.”
The high school guidance counselor’s office is a good starting point in the scholarship search. But just as the quality of services and facilities can vary from school to school, the information supplied by the guidance office can vary.
Soderstrom of the Pullman foundation observes: “The quality is not even. Some of the schools do an outstanding job of publicizing awards, even producing handsome monthly newsletters on the subject. There are public high schools in Chicago that have good programs, but in some of the disadvantaged schools, where only a small number of students go on to college, the counselor puts his effort where the need is, and that can be in vocational and personal counseling.”
Sometimes, the organizations sponsoring scholarships even ask the guidance counselors to select candidates for them. “We let the high schools select candidates,” says Soderstrom of the Pullman Foundation. “Otherwise we would spend all of our time opening envelopes and organizing applications.”
And sometimes the high schools are asked to select the recipient of the award. “If the sponsoring organization wants us to select, we collect the applications and we have a scholarship committee that will rank the applications,” says Fischer. “The student’s name remains anonymous.”
