One Student’s Strategy: Live Home, Work
Sarah Swainson, Chattanooga State Community College
Just before Sarah Swainson graduated from high school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2014, she landed a job as a server at a coffee shop, Milk & Honey.
She liked the job so much she decided to take a gap year between high school and college to work there full time, getting promoted to barista and then to manager.
The $18,000 she saved from her salary and tips while living at home gave her a huge financial cushion when she enrolled at Chattanooga State Community College in 2015.
Swainson was able to win a HOPE Scholarship, too — an award funded by Tennessee’s lottery and given out to students with a minimum of 21 on the ACT or 980 on the SAT and a GPA of at least 3.0. The scholarship covers her $2,000 per semester in tuition and will renew annually as long as she maintains the minimum 3.0 GPA.
Swainson is still working 20 hours a week at the restaurant and living at home, earning up to $500 a week, which helps her cover the cost of books, gas and cellphone as well as chip in for the family’s groceries.
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Swainson plans to transfer to the University of Tennessee–Chattanooga in fall 2017, a school that will cost her twice as much in tuition. But by continuing to live at home and work, while maintaining good spending habits — like resisting the urge to eat out several times a week with her friends — she has eased her concerns about being able to afford the tuition increase.
“I take about 20 to 30 percent of my paycheck and set it aside for spending money, and the rest is for savings,” says Swainson. “I haven’t had to touch the savings yet,” she says, so her kitty now amounts to $22,000.
What’s the best way to juggle a part-time job and a full-time education? Swainson, who is planning a career in recreation management, says she takes time at the beginning of each week to draw up a plan of how she’ll need to allot her time: which hours she’ll be working, when she’ll be in class and what pockets of each day will be left over for getting her studying done.
One Student’s Strategy: Find Scholarships
Jonathan Salazar, Duke University and Yale University
When Jonathan Salazar of Albuquerque, New Mexico, started looking for college scholarships, he was only in ninth grade — and, boy, did the early planning pay off. All told, he was offered $1.8 million by schools that accepted him and ended up with $70,000 to use at $67,654-a-year Duke University.
Salazar, an excellent student who wanted to study out of state but couldn’t afford to without plenty of aid, says he knew “I would have to apply for a lot of scholarships.”
In addition to getting academic and need-based awards from Duke to cover tuition and housing and $1,500 from the New Mexico National Honor Society, Salazar was named a Gates Millennium Scholar.
Funded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the Millennium Scholars program supports 1,000 minority students a year. The rigorous application process — Salazar had to write eight 1,000-word essays over six months — paid off with $10,000 for his freshman year alone.
The Gates scholarship will renew every year, as his Duke award would have had he not decided to transfer to Yale University this fall for sophomore year. The Gates awards also renew through grad school in certain disciplines.
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The other grants and awards he brought to Duke included $5,000 from the Hearst Foundation, whose Senate Youth Program sent him on a weeklong trip to Washington, D.C., during high school.
Salazar also received about $5,700 in needs-based grant funding from the federal government. The Gates scholarship follows him to Yale, and the university is offsetting the balance with grants and a scholarship.
Besides starting early, Salazar went out of his way to form bonds with his teachers. “They’re going to be your recommenders,” he says. It was those relationships that guided him to the Gates program.
One Family’s Strategy: Be a Landlord
Paige Adams, Kennesaw State University
Paige Adams, who graduates from Kennesaw State University near Atlanta in 2017, has had 80 percent of her $7,000-a-year tuition paid for by the HOPE Scholarship she won from the state of Georgia for those with GPAs of at least 3.0, with another award covering the rest.
Her other expenses? Before the start of freshman year, she looked for a way to live near the university without incurring thousands of dollars in housing fees.
Adams’ mother and stepfather have a home just seven miles from campus, but they wanted to support her quest for independence. So the family came up with an innovative solution: Adams found a townhouse near campus that had gone into foreclosure, they snapped it up for $36,000 in cash, and Adams took charge of finding a roommate to help cover utilities, property taxes and maintenance.
The $500 per month her roommate pays in rent goes most of the way, with her parents helping out some, too. And Adams says that being a homeowner has offered her other benefits.
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“I learned a lot about the foreclosure process, and I had to manage renovations,” says Adams, who plans to attend veterinary school after graduation. “I’ve learned to pay bills and do home maintenance.” So far, she has removed wallpaper from the kitchen, stained the kitchen cabinets, landscaped the backyard and changed out some doorknobs.
Adams also thinks her housing is more comfortable than a dorm or off-campus apartment would have been. “Some of my friends live five in a house,” she says.
Her stepfather, Bruce Ailion, happens to be a real estate broker in Atlanta, but he says parents need no special training to use property ownership as a strategy for saving money on college. And it can pay off even after a child’s graduation, depending on the location and purchase price.
“If you own a property that’s close to a major university, it will always be in demand from renters,” Ailion says. And it could be a good investment. He estimates that the value of his family’s townhome, a 1,200- square-foot two-bedroom unit, has skyrocketed to $85,000 in just four years.
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Colleges 2017” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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Students Share Strategies for Making College Affordable originally appeared on usnews.com
