High school seniors are usually the ones sweating over the college scholarship applications, but the tables have been turned in one case.
Nitro, a Wilmington, Del.,-based company that helps parents with college funding resources, is asking parents to fill out a scholarship application and write an essay. The $2,500 Parents’ Scholarship is then awarded to mom and dad instead of to the child.
Mike Brown, managing director of Nitro, says the hope is that filling out the application will provide another avenue of communication between the parents and their child.
“We know a $2,500 scholarship is not going to make a dent in the total student loan debt, but we want to raise awareness of the cost of college and the avenues of help that are out there. Parents are leaving money on the table,” says Brown.
The deadline for filing the application, which can be found on the Nitro website, is May 31. The scholarship will be awarded in early July. The winner will be selected on the basis of the quality and completeness of the submission, and the creativity in the short essay responses and social media posting about the scholarship, Nitro says. In this case it is the parents who have to be creative, not the child. More than 1,000 parents have applied so far. Nitro will award one scholarship a quarter.
Nitro conducted a survey and found that most parents have far too little saved to be of much help to their children with college expenses. The average cost for tuition and fees for one year at a private college is $33,480, according to College Data, an online resource on college information. Total student debt now stands at $1.4 trillion, Nitro says.
According to a survey of 1,000 parents of students who are in college or about to enter, many parents wish they had asked their budding academics to cut a few corners before selecting a college. Thirty-six percent of the parents would have encouraged their children to choose a lower-priced school if they had been aware of the true the cost of higher education. Another 35 percent say they would have pushed their children to consider community college, followed by transferring to a four-year college, if they had understood the savings it could provide.
“Now that acceptance letters have been sent, parents are realizing they’ve committed to a financial obligation they can’t easily meet,” says Brown. “Most parents are surprised by the huge gap between what they think they can afford and what they are expected to pay.”
According to the survey, 80 percent of the parents do not have a tax-advantaged 529 account for their child, and 84 percent has less than $5,000 saved to pay for their child’s college.
Parents feel they should have received more help in preparing for the sticker shock of college costs. Fifty-eight percent feel high school guidance counselors did a poor job of preparing them for the real cost of a higher education.