A big question comes to mind early this morning as the search continues for credible scholarship information to provide to you on SMB College Life. In my previous post I offered the 2008-09 Student Financial Aid packet which is a publication from the US Department of Education. My relationship with the US Department of Education is fairly new when it comes to finding credible information to provide to you, but has been a long, and very expensive relationship when it comes to money provided by them for my college education. The thing that really perplexed me when researching the US Department of Education is that they will provide exceptional information about tax credits, government grants,receiving student loans, managing college finances and so much more, but I have yet to find any scholarship information provided by them. The big question that comes to mind as I sort through pages of information provided by the US Department of Education is why they don't give any information about scholarships. Searching through their database I cannot seem to find anything about scholarships provided to students to help them pay for college.
You can see for yourself by going to their Web site and clicking on Apply For Scholarships & Loans under the Find & Pay For College section. In this section they provide links to receiving government student loans for college as well as information about paying for these loans, financing college through federal student loans, federal student consolidation information for student loans, but nothing about scholarships.
What really puzzles me is that this is THE government paid and controlled agency for United States Education, yet they do not provide information about receiving free money for college. Instead they direct you through links which take you to information about receiving loans through them, paying for your loans, and consolidation your loans through government consolidation programs. All of these things are making the government MORE money!
There are two logical explanations that I can think of which could be reasons for this lack of information. One reason is that there are too many scholarships available that they do not have enough time to dedicate to organizing and providing them on one of the most used college resources ON THE INTERNET (currently ranked #3,788 out of hundreds of million, if not billions of websites on the internet today).
From this idea comes my second justification for the US Department of Education not providing scholarship information in their college information database. Could it be because they want to make as much money as possible from college students by making us think that government loans are the only way to finance our college educations? Why else would they only provide information on every possible way for students to finance college, in which the government profits from?
One would think that they US Department of Education would capitalize on their internet rankings and help millions of student reduce their debt substantially by providing information about receiving free money through scholarships to finance college. I guess by doing this it would reduce their ability to profit from the millions of college students who use federal student loans to pay for college.
Through SMB College Life I want to offer as much useful information as possible that will benefit college students financially. The idea of SMB College Life is that the average financial debt for college students is ridiculously high and we will focus our efforts on finding information to help college students reduce this debt. There are few resources available which offer free information that will financially benefit millions of college students. We hope to fill the need of information about grants, scholarships, and other forms of free money, as well as savings on your college life needs through our corporate sponsorships and partnerships. We need to help each other save money, because it seems as though the ones who are trusted to do so aren't delivering the most beneficial results that they could. So who is left to turn to??
Could it be possible that students can receive scholarships from their individual state governments either directly or through funding to the universities. I think there's a lack of federal information is because the national government probably dont deal with individual scholarsips.
This could very well be true and is one of the things I discuss above. The thing that I really don't understand is why the US Department of Education cannot offer this information through their database. The obviously have connections to individual states and universities as they breathe down their necks as soon as taxes are due. I just think that if it's your full time job to provide as much information as possible to college students then you should include every detail. I mean here I am providing as much information as I possibly can in my free time and NOT getting paid for it. It's not my full time job but I do it because I feel that college students rack up way too much debt in order to pay for college when they really do not need to. I believe there is a gap between paying for college and finding/receiving financial aid through scholarships.
Could it be possible that students can receive scholarships from their individual state governments either directly or through funding to the universities. I think there's a lack of federal information is because the national government probably dont deal with individual scholarsips.