Nowadays, high schoolers across the nation are expected to do so much from getting great grades, to playing a sport, taking part in a school theater production, seek leadership in an extra-curricular activity and volunteer. Now when a student is juggling all of these components, what is student to do about learning finances. One important component that is getting overlooked by the high schools and colleges is financing models to afford a post-secondary education. This post brings to light tactics to employ to do as much as one student can in going about the college process. Currently, what is out there to help shoulder the rising costs of post-secondary education?
I have provided some checklist items to investigate to reduce costs as the college-bound student makes their decision about where to enroll:
___ In-state tuition
___ Community College Transfer to four-year programs
___ Online College
___ Summer Job
___ Textbook Rentals
___ Become a Resident Advisor
___ Credit Hour Overload/Summer School
How to make the application process cheap, check out the following applications.
- The Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success
- By filling this out, colleges enlisted in this application will provide affordable tuition and meet all necessary financial aid need.
- Provides all necessary tools free of charge to investigate all colleges out there, so that student is as informed as they can be when deciding to attend college.
- Next Tier Education
- An organizing tool that allows for an automated process that keeps all necessary information and timelines for the college application process.
By using the tactics above, it will allow for students to take ownership of the situation but still would need some additional support to sustain movement of bringing down the costs of a post-secondary education. Looking on the other side of the issue, I bring to the light the institutional side of the matter and how legislation and funding models could spell out this affordability solution.
Return on Education Investment Think Public and Promise
Over the past decade there has been a growing movement of free college programs called promise programs that would be set up for local communities to help students who are in the most need such as first generation, underrepresented, and underserved student populations. The premise of these programs is set forth to make student-community agreements to complete school by the desired time set forth by the promise program and in return would have all or majority of their education covered by the promise program. To promise programs more of a reality there needs to be buy-in from key stakeholders such as school administrators, government officials, local communities, business leaders and philanthropic foundations. With these structures having buy-in it can do only so much pending state and operational budgets.
Charity Charge and Affordable Education: How additional funding can help?
In the State of New York, a new legislation has been proposed that would provide families making less $100,000/year to receive free education to any State University of New York or City University of New York school. This initiative is called the Excelsior Scholarship and would include raising the state budget and colleges keep their tuition frozen during their enrollment. Now how could Charity Charge help? Citizens of a municipality would use their Charity Charge card and designate their donation to the local public schools to then feed into this type of college affordability and access program.
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