As the school year draws to a close, a question on students’ minds is how they are going to pay for college for the next year. It’s common knowledge that student loans are a part of college but scholarships are also a part of college life.
There are multiple kinds of scholarships and there are hundreds that University students can choose from that are available online, Betsy Johnson, director of student financial aid and scholarships, said. When scholarships don’t get claimed, there’s two things that can happen to the money that would have been awarded.
“Either we could re-award it to another student or that money is then used the following year,” Johnson said.
While Johnson doesn’t know the exact number of scholarships that are turned down each year, she does have some insight as to why some of them are turned down. Johnson said that scholarships for continuing students and scholarships that have a special application for them rarely go unused.
Instead, some athletic scholarships go unused because a student athlete may have chosen to go to another school instead, Johnson said.
The freshman scholarships that depend on different components may also not be used as many colleges and universities offer different packages.
“At the same time, we have to stay within an institutional budget as well,” Johnson said. “So, some not being used is OK.”
For junior Morgan Palmer, she knows where she can get scholarships through the school, but it’s a matter of making sure she’s completely eligible for scholarships is where she runs into trouble.
“I did once and some of it I wasn’t eligible for,” Palmer said.
If scholarships were more accessible, she said she would definitely apply for more of them.
In fact, the accessibility of scholarships seems to be the problem for most students. Sophomore Jordan Garich said she’s applied to scholarships but feels as though they aren’t advertised as much as they could be.
“I feel like they’re not super advertised around campus. I had a history professor … who handed out a handout about the different history major scholarships and if she hadn’t handed out the paper I wouldn’t have known about them,” Garich said.
Scholarships are able to be searched online at the University’s website, though the way the website is set up might be changing in the future, as Johnson wants to improve for future use.
“Everything’s not located in one spot,” Johnson said. “For BGSU-specific scholarships, we have a page, we have a searchable scholarship area and then we have them divided out by the colleges or if it’s a foundation scholarship … so they’re still not clean in one space. That’s definitely something I’m looking at for future years to improve upon.”
Johnson says to look at libraries and even where their parents work to see if there are scholarship options for them. She also recommends looking at scholarship search engines online but sticking to only one search engine to eliminate seeing the same scholarship pop up twice.
And for students who are worried about what the FAFSA form might have said, Johnson said not all scholarships need the FAFSA filled out in order to get the scholarships. Instead, only need-based scholarships are required to show the FAFSA.
