A new online tool makes it easier for students to find free money to pay for grad school.
Sallie Mae, a Delaware-based student loan company, released Graduate School Scholarship Search, which allows current and prospective graduate and professional students to hunt for private scholarships. The search tool boasts more than 850,000 scholarships that amount to $1 billion.
“There’s a lack of understanding that there’s availability of scholarships for grad school,” says Rick Castellano, a spokesman for Sallie Mae. “With grad students, they don’t know where to look. When we talk to them, they’ll just say they Google searched.”
Currently, only 15 percent of graduate students’ costs are covered by grants, fellowships, scholarships or tuition waivers, according to Sallie Mae’s recent inaugural report, How America Pays for Graduate School. That’s much lower compared with college students, who cover 35 percent of education costs with scholarships and grants, as reported by the loan company’s survey on How America Pays for College.
For prospective graduate and professional students, here are a few approaches to consider when tracking down free money to pay for an advanced degree.
[See graduate degrees that pay more than $100,000.]
1. Use scholarship search engines: While Sallie Mae’s Graduate School Scholarship Search lists scholarships and fellowships available at the graduate level, other scholarship search engines list private scholarships for grad students in addition to awards available for college students. A few of these scholarship databases include Unigo, Fastweb and Scholarship America.
GoGrad is another online resource that lists several niche scholarships for prospective and current grad students.
While grad school scholarships tend to be more modest compared with those offered to undergraduates, experts say a $1,000 award can still help reduce living costs and student loan borrowing.
2. Identify scholarships available via professional organizations: Students can apply for scholarships by finding and joining professional associations in their chosen field of study. For instance, members of the National Black MBA Association Inc. can apply for a $10,000 award provided by General Electric Co. and the Lloyd Trotter Scholarship Fund.
As another example, the Dental Trade Alliance Foundation awards $5,000 scholarships to more than 30 dental students annually.
[Read when paying $100,000 for a graduate degree is worth it.]
3. Consider doctoral programs: Prospective students might consider pursuing a Ph.D. over a master’s degree, depending on the discipline, experts say.
“The common thing I’ve heard is it much more difficult to find funding for a master’s degree than a Ph.D.,” says Allanté Whitmore, doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University. The GEM Fellowship program awarded Whitmore a full fellowship to pursue a joint Ph.D. in civil engineering and engineering and public policy.
The difference in funding is because many universities use master’s degrees as revenue streams, says TJ Murphy, an associate professor of pharmacology at the Emory University School of Medicine and founder of gradschoolmatch.com, a site the matches prospective students with graduate programs.
“Many think that the standard progression is get your bachelor’s and then you go get your master’s and then go get a Ph.D. But usually Ph.D.s are funded by the university. So it turns out if you’re good enough at the bachelor’s level, in a lot of fields you can skip a master’s completely and go straight to the Ph.D.,” Murphy says.
[Discover how to attend medical school for free.]
4. Ask about grant money, scholarships and assistant positions: Oftentimes students submit an application without finding out more about a program as well as potential funding and assistantship opportunities.
Murphy, who spent several years recruiting doctoral students for the pharmacology program at Emory, advises students to introduce themselves to a program before submitting an application. “You should try to schedule a phone call with someone in the program and find out where you stand [academically] and what kind of funds are available,” he says.
He says students should try to speak to someone in the program who plays a role in the recruitment process. “It’s only people in those programs who are going to be able to answer those questions,” he says.
Murphy adds that prospective students can be direct with their questions. For example, a student can ask: “Am I the type of student who could receive grant money?” They can also ask: “What type of scholarships have students in your program received?”
“A lot of times students don’t realize how important they can be,” Murphy says. “We bring in more grant money when they make discoveries.”
Searching for a grad school? Get our complete rankings of Best Graduate Schools.
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How to Find Free Money for Grad School originally appeared on usnews.com
