Saving for college? Consider a match program, scholarships

The start of the next school year is coming up for many students across the US, with many setting their sights on getting into the college of their dreams. With the price of higher education ballooning, a good strategy to aid in handling college costs is to apply for numerous scholarships or even go through a college match program.

Yahoo Finance anchor Madison Mills joins Wealth! to give insight into the scholarship application process and what prospective students and parents should know about applying.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Wealth!

This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

Well college.

It's expensive and costs.

They're only rising the average American spending more than $25,000 annually for undergraduate tuition and other costs like room and board.

And while scholarships play an important role in our college attendance, the reality is that only a small fraction of students receive scholarships, and most awards are insufficient to cover any significant costs here to weigh in on her own application experience, we've got our very own Madison Mills.

Hey, Maddie, Brad.

So I'm now embarrassed at thinking about how long ago this was.

But when I was applying to college a while ago, uh, I was able to apply through a scholarship programme called Quest Bridge.

Uh, and interestingly, I found out about this programme because I had a history teacher in high school who posted about scholarships on our white board every single day.

That's the only way I knew about this scholarship.

So shout out to the teachers telling their students about scholarships out there.

But what's interesting about Quest Bridge is that it is for low income, high achieving high school students, and you're able to apply to a basket of schools under one application, which is also really important for low income students who struggle to pay for several college applications.

Those costs can really add up.

Quest Bridge matches you, though with a school, so you don't necessarily get to pick which college you end up at.

I was very lucky to get matched with the University of Southern California.

Going to college in L A for four years was not too bad.

Uh, and you don't have to pay for it, so my tuition was fully covered through Quest Bridge.

But for the types of students who are applying to a programme like Quest Bridge and it's not just them, there's also Posse.

There are several other national scholarships that help you get that full tuition aid.

But full tuition is not gonna be enough if you're coming from a family that is not able to contribute to your education.

So I think it's really important to note that there are local scholarships that folks can look to to fuel those additional expenses, things like room and board, obviously food.

Uh, and we were talking about this earlier only 0.2% of college students scholarships worth 25 K or more so applying to a lot of different scholarships will help you fuel that broader bank account you can pull from for that room and board and the lifestyle that you wanna be able to have while you're in school.

Uh, when I was in high school, I applied to nearly 100 scholarships at the local level.

Uh, I. I had a lot of individual ones that were able to help me.

They just basically send you a check.

So that's really useful for paying for things like, you know, food.

And of course, room and board And what not?

But I would recommend looking at hyper local scholarships and anything that you can tie to a hobby that you might have, Uh, because those are a little bit less competitive than if you were to just google, you know, scholarships.

A lot of people will be applying to those national ones.

So try and look at the hyper local ones as well.

Yeah, my only advice.

Make friends with the, uh, the dining centre security.

That's that's all.

That's a great Well, we could talk about that.

We could Yeah, indeed.

Thanks so much.

A much more useful piece of advice from Matt.

Thanks so much