Scholarships for High School Students

Every once in awhile you hear about a student who get a full scholarship to go to college. They’ve excelled in something, usually a sport, and are getting a free ride for college. Every parent dreams of their child getting one of these types of scholarships, but the reality is that you’re almost as likely to win the lottery as your child is to get a large enough scholarship to allow them to attend school free of charge. While there aren’t that many huge scholarships out there, especially for students who aren’t athletes, there are a number of smaller scholarships for high school students available that your child can use to help put them through their college years.

Their Specialty

Before you can begin looking for scholarships for high school students that will lean to their specialty, you need to know what their specialty is. What does your child like to do and excel at? Request a copy of your child’s transcript and grab some highlighters. Make each subject matter a certain color – for instance use yellow for English classes, blue for Math classes, and so on. Go through the entire transcript and highlight everything with your child. Often both parent and child are surprised at the classes that the child has taken, and will discover where their interests truly lay. More than one student has believed that they were a history major only to look at their transcript to discover that they took more English courses than history courses!

Start Searching

When you start searching for scholarships for high school students, don’t look immediately for the biggest and the brightest. Instead, start looking for some of the smaller ones. Look for scholarships for high school students that go over more than just a year’s time. There are many that will pay a specific amount a year for four years, which will make it much less stressful next year to figure out how you and your student are going to pay for their education. Have your student apply for as many as they can, and lend them a hand when they need it.

While you may not be able to find a huge scholarships lurking out there that will make your child’s education completely free, you should be able to find many smaller scholarships that, when added together, take the amount that you and your student will owe down from something that is scary to look at to something that seems manageable.