Happy Friday, everyone. National Reading Month (March) is winding down in favor of April, which is Financial Literacy Month! WOOT WOOT! It’s about to be our month!!! Until then, here’s another highlight from our huge collection of nonfiction articles…

Mistakes That Will Cost You a College Scholarship

What is it? A Time magazine article about three problems to avoid once you’ve got a college scholarship so you can be sure to keep the college scholarship.

Why is it cool? In putting together our Paying for College unit, we found tons of websites devoted to the how to get a scholarship, but there are far fewer on how to keep a scholarship. While this article’s perhaps a bit longer than it really needed to be, it addresses an important topic if students want to keep themselves funded for all four (or five… or six…) years of undergrad.

Questions I Might Ask:

1. Let’s Think About the Math
   • The article says 59% of freshmen receive some form of grant or scholarship, but 25% of freshmen receive some sort of merit-based scholarship from their college each year. Why are those two numbers different?
   • The article also says 25% of freshmen receive merit-based scholarships, but only 20% of non-freshmen receive them. Why are those two numbers different?
   • The average student’s GPA falls 0.47 between high school and college. Why do you think that’s the case? Don’t go with just the obvious — because the classes are harder.
   • Why do you think so many scholarships and grants have GPA requirements to maintain them?
2. Reading for Comprehension
   • Why do you think the author refers to athletic scholarships as the least dependable type?
   • Where would a student need to look to find the scholarship maintenance requirements for his/her specific college?
   • Which majors tend to have more students lose their merit-based scholarships? Why do you think this is the case?
3. Deeper Thinking
   • If you need to maintain a high GPA, one strategy would be to take as easy of courses as possible. What might be an argument against that strategy?
   • If colleges see that large fractions of students are losing their merit-based scholarships after the first year, why don’t they make the requirements easier (for example, lower their GPA requirements)?

Where is it in the NGPF collection? This is resource 16 in our “Grants & Scholarships: Free Money!” lesson in the Paying for College unit.

About the Author

Jessica Endlich

When I started working at Next Gen Personal Finance, it's as though my undergraduate degree in finance, followed by ten years as an educator in an NYC public high school, suddenly all made sense.