As a teacher you understand that being too busy to help every single student with every single need does not mean that you do not care about your kids.
You want to help them, but you don’t always have enough time to give each individual the amount of time and attention he or she needs. Nowhere is this truer than with graduating seniors who need help finding scholarships.
You probably have a quick guide for your students about the local scholarships that they can compete to win. But what if your student does not either want or qualify for those locally sourced scholarships? What if, for example, your student wants to go to college out of state? What if he or she is hoping to get scholarships for a highly specialized skill?
This is where third party scholarships become an important resource for your student (and knowing where to find them being an important skill for you to develop). For example, if you have a student who has been active within your community you can point him to the 21st Century Insurance scholarship (http://www.21st.com/landing-pages/en/scholarship.jsp) for community service.
Of course, compiling a list of third party scholarships is time consuming and would take more time than any teacher could ever hope to have at his or her disposal. So what do you do? How do you help your students?
Luckily there are a bunch of different financial aid and scholarship portals to help students fill this exact need.
FastWeb
FastWeb has arguably been around the longest. Students in the mid-late 90s were using it to find scholarships that met their needs and skill sets. What’s great about this site is that it helps students find financial aid and scholarships for pretty much every type of educational institution out there.
This means that a student going to a traditional four year university will find just as much good information as a student who is going to be taking online courses at the University of Phoenix. The website allows students to input their criteria and then returns a list of scholarships for which they can and should apply.
CollegeBoard
CollegeBoard.com was rated as the best scholarship search portal by US News. The company was founded in 1900 and in the late 1990s started publishing a huge book of scholarships and putting scholarship and other higher education funding opportunities online (you can find the search platform here). This is a great resource because the team behind the site checks every single scholarship in the system every year. This way they can weed out those financial aid opportunities that are no longer operational or worthy of a student’s time. You won’t have to worry that your kids are spending days on a wild goose chase when they use this site.
Obviously you are a good teacher who wants as many of your students to go to college as possible.
Unfortunately you simply don’t have the time to help every single one of them as thoroughly as you’d like to help them. That is why knowing about portals like these can be helpful—both for you and for your students!
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