taekwondo scholarship ?

Paying for College
1

Hi to everyone. My son is a tkd athele 2nd dan how just got a bronze medal at the British National Championships ( Britain was ranked 2nd in the world at Rio ). He is an A- student at 9th grade. We are trying to find out if any university has a scholarship program that matches our case? Is it too early to search? Thanks

2

Why does he need a scholarship for college now if he is in 9th grade?

3

The best scholarships come from the colleges and are either based on need (income) as determined by the college or merit (SAT/ACT + unweighted GPA). They aren’t awarded for individual accomplishments. Spend some time reading the financial aid forum to get a better idea of how it works.

You can run the FAFSA4caster to get an idea of what your EFC will be. If it’s low enough, your son will qualify for a federal Pell grant of up to ~$5k/year. The FAFSA EFC has no bearing on the parent contribution calculated by the colleges. Those numbers can be very different. He can also take the federal student loan (~$5500/year). Any other grants will come from the schools.

You can also run a couple Net Price Calculators (each school has one on its website) to get an estimate of what the college would cost if your son was enrolling next year. You may have to play with test scores and GPA to see what scores would qualify your son for merit aid, but I think you can get a rough idea of out-of-pocket costs.

4

Thank you for the advice. I know it is early in my case but I would like to know what to do in the future.

5

Is your son a U.S. citizen?

6

No, he is British. We heard that some us universities give financial aid to athletes but we don’t know details and also if tkd is a sport that might interest them.

7

Then ignore everything in post #2 about FAFSA, Pell grants and federal loans.

Athletic scholarships are given by many schools for intercollegiate sports, but I doubt that tkd is one of them.

8

There are scholarships for air rifle so I’m sure there are scholarships for tkd. Look for the best collegiate teams and go from there.

9

It is not an NCAA sport (or the other two sports assoc). Any scholarships would be through local organizations and they’d have their own requirements (for their students only, for US students only).

http://www.gocollege.com/financial-aid/scholarships/athletic/martial-arts.html

10

@tkdathlete Currently, there are no scholarships available for taekwondo. There is a push being made to make taekwondo a NCAA sport, and if that were to happen, then scholarships would become more likely over the next few years. Currently, the main form of college taekwondo competition is in the form of club level competition such as those hosted by the Eastern Colligate Taekwondo Conference (ECTC) ectc-online.org

High-level taekwondo athletes currently have 3 main options when looking at colleges.

  1. Pick a competitive club team at a school that matches their academics, train and compete with the club. Some will additionally spend some time training with a high-level school near they college. Some will opt to just train with a non-affiliated school as they are sued to in high school, though many find this difficult to balance correctly as non-affiliated schools are not built around working with a college student’s workload and schedule.

  2. Skip or put off college to train taekwondo full time.

  3. Effectively retire from full-time taekwondo competition, and move on to other pursuits.

If you have any other questions about the state of US collegiate taekwondo, good club teams to look at, or anything like that please feel free to leave them below or message me directly.