With the school year coming to a close, a majority of high school seniors are looking forward to their post secondary education. With these plans comes the pressure of applying for scholarships to possibly help relieve the overwhelming cost of college.
While many scholarships provide great opportunities and help for financing a post secondary pathway, the pressure to apply for scholarships is often incongruent with the probability of actually receiving any. As seniors, there is constant pressure from parents, teachers, peers and others to apply for scholarships.
At Pleasant Valley, for example, students are added to a Google Classroom solely dedicated to scholarships they may be eligible for. In addition to those, students are typically marketed various opportunities from teachers within certain subjects or career fields. Again, while these are great opportunities, the more they are marketed, the less likely a student is to actually receive the scholarship.
For many, senior year already comes with a substantial amount of stress between college applications and decisions, challenging classes and preparing for graduation. The pressure to apply for as many scholarships as possible on top of that can be a frustrating balancing act. “There is always the pressure from parents since it helps a lot with the cost of college but a lot of times there isn’t a specific time set aside for scholarship work. We are expected to be in school from eight to three while being involved in extracurriculars, working jobs and keeping up on homework. It is an incredible amount of work to keep track of on top of all the scholarship work. It is a lot, especially in the last semester of your high school career. This doesn’t even stop in college because we have to keep applying year after year and most of the time not a lot of benefit is given for the time spent, which really leaves the question of if it is really worth it,” Iowa State freshman Sarah Paul said.
Typical scholarships tend to range anywhere from $500 to $4000, spread out across 4 years, yet the application process for most of them are roughly the same. Most require a submitted transcript, an ACT or SAT score, two to three letters of recommendation, an essay and possibly more. For just one scholarship application, this is clearly an immense amount of work and effort from not just the student, but counselors and those who wrote letters of recommendation.
Unfortunately, all of this work simply puts the student in consideration for the scholarship, with no guarantee of actually receiving anything. “There have been times when I have spent hours on various scholarships just to be denied. These are usually hours when I could be working on other things like homework and the things on my to do list that already come with college. Plus when I started filling out applications I didn’t know much since we don’t talk about applying for them often. We are told how to keep track of it all but we aren’t told tips on how to write solid scholarship essays or told that when we do start applying we need to have a lot of time set aside,” said Paul.
On the contrary, some students feel the time and effort they have put into applying for a large variety of scholarships has paid off for them in the end. “I think scholarships are great opportunities even though they can be very long. From writing the essays and asking people for letters of recommendation they are extremely time consuming. Despite this, due to the amount of money you can receive from these, the work and time they take is definitely worth it,” senior Reagan Pagniano said.
Scholarships provide students with a good opportunity to help relieve the financial stress college costs impart on students, but sometimes, students’ perception of realistically receiving one or more scholarships is clouded by the pressure placed on them to apply for as many as possible.
