Grades can Equal Money
Can an A in high school equal $16,000? Absolutely, it can.
High schoolers; community college students planning to transfer to a university - (even middle schoolers getting ready for high school) - This is for you.
Getting A’s in high school and/or at a community college can make all the difference when paying for a four-year college.
Need-based financial aid is not given to everyone who needs it.
Why? There’s no perfect tool by which to measure need, so we fill out the FAFSA (a form the government and many organizations use to assess financial need) and cross our fingers. But not everyone’s parents can or will pay for their children’s higher education. Still, the assumption from a financial aid perspective is that college students will have access to their parents’ income, even if they don’t.
Plus, even if parents want to pay for their kids’ higher ed, the FAFSA has no way of accounting for all the other demands on the resources listed. Your grandparents may be aging and in need of care. There may be several kids in college or approaching college age all at the same time. There could be medical expenses or employment uncertainty.
The FAFSA doesn’t know about any of this, and it is lagging by at least a full year. Just because you or your parents made a certain amount last year, doesn’t mean that will happen again this year. And, again, there could be a lot of competition for those resources. It may not all be sitting there waiting to pay for your tuition and living expenses while you’re in college.
This is where merit-based scholarships can make a difference. This is free money (not loans) that is given out based on achievements (like good grades), not financial need. Work you put in starting on your very first day of high school can get cashed in quite literally.
I know someone who got a full ride (out-of-state) to a prestigious public university, with all tuition and living expenses covered. In today’s money that would be over $300,000 by the time they graduate. All because they were:
Super-diligent in high school or at the community college level
Good at communicating their genuine interest in the institution and what makes them different from other candidates
And… lucky
If you end up taking about 20 classes in all of high school, it’s possible that the A you got last semester in English Language Arts will be worth $16,000 some day, a couple years from now. Private universities in the US can be even more expensive, but they also have more money to give away, so, for the right candidate, they can end up costing less, meaning the pay for that A just went up.
Grades are not everything, but they can be the gatekeeper to a lot of opportunities.