Scholarship Dollars May Be All Around You, but You Have to Look

You may be surprised to learn that your son or daughter, despite his or her impeccable credentials, has not been awarded a scholarship or grant by the school that he or she is intent on attending.

There is a chance that you may be able to exert some leverage if you sincerely believe, and can back it up with numbers, that your child is "above the norm" at a particular school. You can appeal your child's financial-aid award, or lack thereof, and in some rare cases you may be successful.

But for the vast majority of situations, you are simply going to have to suck it up and figure out how you are going to pay for the next year, indeed the next four years (or more), of college.

This is where a scholarship in hand from an outside source would come in very handy. And, if you are the parent of high school junior or sophomore, this is the time when you and your family should familiarize yourselves with the potential availability of scholarship dollars that could be all around you, if you only knew where to look.

Fortunately, the clues for your scholarship search are pretty simple, and they can be found all around you.

You can start by peering in the mirror; some scholarship dollars are available based on ethnicity alone. Then look at a piece of mail on your kitchen counter. Your hometown address can mean a lot. More than 1,100 U.S. communities have "Dollars for Scholars" chapters, usually meaning that a pooling of public and private resources have created a scholarship fund for students from that locale.

Now open your wallet (you're going to be doing that a lot in the next four years anyway;>), and look at your business card or employee ID. Your company may indeed make available scholarship dollars for the sons and daughters of workers.

You may also want to dig a little deeper in that wallet, and find some receipts from stores you've visited recently. You are likely to have made purchases at one or more of the major national chains in recent weeks and, believe it or not, they offer scholarship dollars in many cases too, not just to their employees' children, but to their customers' kids too. It's good, old-fashioned community relations, and it could bring you some good, old-fashioned cash. Visit some large retailers' Web sites, click around and you may be surprised at what you find. This is not necessarily "free money," as there often are essay contests or some other competitive aspect to the doling out of these dollars. But persistence can pay off, literally.

The list above is only the start. Your place of worship, your community associations or clubs, your union status, your professional standing, your banking relationships, your insurance company are all the touch-points in your life that "could" be sources of scholarship funds.

We choose the word "could" very deliberately. By no means are we promising that all or any of these touch-points "will" be sources of scholarship money for your son or daughter.

What we are promising is that your membership in College Parents of America will provide you the best tips and the most complete resources on where to search for scholarship dollars. We'll tell you the scholarship-search Web sites to know, and which ones to avoid. We'll advise you what time of year to begin your search and when to throw in the towel.

And, as we grow, we aspire to some day offer some scholarship dollars ourselves. We are actually thinking that we would "award" our scholarships to you as parents, and we are bandying about some ideas on how we might administer our program. Nothing is in place yet, so no need to send us your essay on why you will be the model college parent. But if you are inspired to send us a "parents scholarship" idea, then please do so; we always value your helpful suggestions.