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Home › Articles › College Information › The Next Step

The Next Step

5 Creative Ways to
Help Finance College

By Melinda Copp

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As your college hopeful wraps up the application process, the next step toward higher education is figuring out how to pay for it.

Next Step magazine's annual parent pole revealed that while 93.9 percent of parents feel that it is very important or extremely important that their child obtain a four-year college degree, only 12.1 percent of parents have saved more than $25,000 to pay for it. The polefound that the majority of parents have saved less than $5,000.

With the cost of four years at an in-state public school averagingmore than$51,000, and four years at a private school now topping $121,000, according to College Board's Trends in College Pricing 2006, parents and students often look to financial aid to help fund education. Unfortunately, financial aid isn't always free money.

"A lot of people think of scholarships and grants when they hear financial aid," says Laura Hammond, editor of Next Step, a college and career planning magazine for high school students. "It's tempting to think that everyone is smart enough to get school endowments and go for free, but that's not always true."

In most cases, financial aid means loans and loans have to be paid back. But that doesn't mean that every college student has to graduate with a bill for $50,000 or more.

Hammond offers the following tips for finding and saving money to help fund education.

Settle for a Safety School
When looking for a college, prospective students often apply to three types of schools. First, they stretch by applying to a school that they would love to attend, but their grades and test scores might fall short of the institution's requirements. Second, they typically apply to schools where they know they fit. And third, most students throw in a safety school.

The safety school is an institution where they would still be happy, but their scores and grades are higher than most other students' at that particular school. Although the safety school may not be your child's dream school, it can save you some money.

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