Scholarships

[SpazzyJessie]

Sorry! Kind of a prepharm question but need to ask those with experience.... My parents seem to think its possible to get scholarships/grants to pay for 1/3 tuition costs. My research indicates this is a crazy assumption as most scholarships are relatively small in comparison to tuition and a lot are only offered to p2 and higher. What has been your experience?

 

[xiphoid2010]

Too much variations between schools, public vs private, big endowment or nil.

I went to the state university. Scholarships came in 2 flavors: need based and merit based. I wasn't poor enough to qualify for need based scholarship, but keeping GPA above 3.7 got me $2500/yr merit based ones. Tuition averaged $14k/yr back then.

So a dirt poor student who also study hard could potentially get enough to cover 1/3 of the tuition at a state school.

 

[msweph]

We had scholarships-- about 1/3 of the college got $500-1000/year. usually it was the same 1/3 of the class that got them every year.

Also there were general scholarships that were given out based on high school grades. I got about 2k per year and a few random scholarships from high school.

 

[BidingMyTime]

sure, its "possible" to, but is it likely? No. It's possible to get full scholarships, but 99.9% of people aren't going to get that. Your parents are wrong if they are expecting you to be able to get a 1/3rd scholarship...realistically, you would really have to have some out of the norm factor to get that good of a scholarship (it would be more likely to get several scholarships that added up to a total of 1/3rd, but even that is pretty unusual.) If your parents think just because you are smart, have good grades, and have lots of extracurricular activities & honors that you will be a shoo-in for scholarships, then they are not aware that all of your competition for those scholarships will have those same things.

 

[MatCauthon]

My general impression is that very few people had a scholarship greater than 2k. Getting the bigger scholarships like the APhA scholarships takes an extraordinary CV. If you are a minority or have special connections you might be able to find a bigger scholarship around 5k.

In general, scholarships are much tighter than days past. There isn't nearly as much money to go around. Far more money goes to undergraduate scholarships than graduate. All of this is school specific, of course. Endowments vary by location. How the endowments are dispersed also vary.

 

[radio frequency]

The best scholarships are usually the ones given by your individual school. My school has some great scholarships, but you generally had to be in deep debt already or be an early and exceptional applicant.

Most of the "big name" scholarships aren't even that big. The APhA-ASP scholarships mentioned above are very prestigious, but don't come with much money attached.