<p>"Salinas, Calif-Finding a way to pay for college is always difficult, finding a way to help pay for a friend to go to college is even harder. Hector Rojas and Leticia Garcia-Romo have been friends since they met in math class last year. Both are great students, both dreamed of going to college, “I knew my parents weren’t able to help me so I had to help myself,” said Garcia-Romo.</p>
<p>Leticia’s dream came true when she was awarded $718,326 in scholarships. She’s going to Princeton next year. “It is possible even though things can be hard it is possible to succeed,” said Garcia-Romo. One of the scholarships Leticia won was the $40,000 Matsui, given to local Salinas kids. She knew if she passed on it, it would go to the next student in line, her friend Hector. “I knew he really needed it but it wasn’t just because I knew him. It was because it was the right thing to do,” said Garcia Romo. Hector was thrilled, “I was feeling really excited like I can’t believe that my dream of going to college is going to happen,” said Rojas." (continued)</p>
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<p>Leticia, Princeton should be proud to have you as a student.</p>
<p>It’s nice for her that she won so much money, and nice that a friend of hers was next in line for some of the money, but most scholarships can only be applied to the cost of education, and Princeton doesn’t cost $718,326, so the young woman will have to forfeit more than just $40,000.</p>
<p>The article is interesting. The entire high school class of 400 earned $5.3 million in scholarship money, so when you take out this young lady’s earnings, it’s about $11,500 per student for the rest of the class. Some of the excess, do doubt, will go to other students at the other schools that offered her scholarships.</p>
<p>I confess I don’t get it. How does one student ‘get’ over $700,000 in scholarships? Did they simply total what each school she was admitted to had offered her? Are they counting the scholarship she ‘passed’ on? And what were the requirements for the Matsui? Maybe, for example, it had to be applied to an in state college and her acceptance of Princeton’s offer made her ineligible, not that she magnanimously offered it to the next in line. </p>
<p>I’m not trying to detract from either student’s accomplishments or altruism. It’s the journalism that bothers me. When scholarship articles are unclear, as this one is to me, then people are misled about how the whole thing works.</p>
<p>First of all, wow. How do you even make that much money?.. That’s incredible.</p>
<p>Second of all, big deal. How altruistic. She has AT LEAST $300,000 that she will never use on education. It would be disgusting if she were to keep something that she couldn’t use for herself, assuming they didn’t take it away. The thread implies that she actually made some sort of sacrifice. She does nothing of the sort.</p>
<p>It would be like…</p>
<p>“Hey, do you want this free milk I got with my apple juice? I’m lactose intolerant.”</p>
… it doesn’t work like that. She applied to a bunch of schools and several gave her merit or need-based aid (plus at least one outside scholarship). It’s not like they just deposit the money in your bank account. These are tuition discounts.</p>
<p>If she received financial aid from Princeton, the Matsui scholarship would have just reduced her amount of Princeton money. I agree this is a journalistic attempt to create a story, rather than report the economic facts of need-based financial aid.</p>
<p>What the high schools do is add up ALL the scholarship money awarded - from the universities and outside scholarships. My son’s school of 47 graduating seniors recieved over 6.2 million in scholarship offers. But they are offers - most of them will not be used. For instance, my son was offered a full tuition scholarship (4 year) to Rose Hulman, but turned it down to go to Northwestern - that is worth about $150,000. That full tuition scholarship was still included in the total scholarships offered. Hopefully that’ll clear it up.</p>
<p>thats how my school does it, it makes the school look better. I got offered about 1 million in scholarship, and one of my friends got about 800,000 dollars, and they added it all together to say our class of 11 got 2.8 mill in scholarship. even though we are only accepting about 500,000 dollars of it.</p>
<p>Same at my school - my class brought in $8 million across 116 different colleges, but our class has 104 people, 58 who are staying in Arkansas (home state) across 6 colleges. So, the remaining 46 can’t possible attend the other 110 colleges (nor can we all accept the ~$8 million in scholarships/aid).</p>