You also can't be sure you'll get the money, and tuition payments have due dates. “It’s a Band-Aid,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor at Temple University and the author of Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream. “People are turning to this because they don’t know what else to do. And it’s certainly not a scalable or sustainable way to finance college.”
“I think, in one-off cases where there’s a really compelling story, I’m sure it can work,” said Ben Miller, senior director for post-secondary education at the Center for American Progress. “But as a regular solution for most people, definitely not.”
Then there are taxes. In general, money raised on GoFundMe won't be taxed as income. Scholarship money is taxable if it exceeds tuition, fees, and required course-related expenses. The $10,000 GoFundMe prizes aren’t taxable, according to the company. The official contest rules, covering contingencies, say “all federal, state, and local taxes, if any, are the responsibility of the winner” and that “the prize can only be used for tuition and fees at an accredited post-secondary educational institution located in the United States.”
Students are supposed to report scholarships to their schools. GoFundMe winner Alan Gonez, 21, said he’d have to tell the University of California at Los Angeles of his prize. Gonez, who reported a past scholarship and saw his aid package reduced, is worried about the impact of the $10,000.
That Gonez is at UCLA at all is remarkable. In sixth grade, he recalled, students heard loud pops, and the teacher told them to get under their desks. When it was safe to emerge, the kids looked through the window and saw the upper half of a body sticking out of a liquor store entrance. In seventh grade, a 14-year-old friend was killed nearby. Gonez got involved with a gang in middle school.
When his mother found out, “it broke her heart,” he said. “She was really disappointed in me, and I was disappointed in myself, and I didn’t know what I had gotten myself into.”
He raised his grades, fell back into the gang, and then broke away and excelled academically. He was going to join the armed forces, but his mother persuaded him to try school. He planned to attend California State Polytechnic University at Pomona following three years in community college, when he learned, with a shock, of his acceptance to UCLA. Two of his professors had encouraged him to apply to UCLA and the University of California at Berkeley.
At Cal Poly Pomona, where a couple of close friends and his girlfriend were going, Gonez could have lived comfortably with the aid he was offered. At UCLA, he’s juggling financial aid, an outside scholarship, and two loans. His mother has also helped out. An office manager at a crane company, whose boss paid for his books this quarter, she has long been involved in his education and is a member of the UCLA Parents' Council. Gonez aspires to be a special agent with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Muturi, Yazzie, and Gonez all got the same pleasant surprise in the same charming way. What they thought was a video interview as a finalist turned into the news itself. They’d won.