The Final Countdown - Countdown to College
September 4, 2007
College can teach your students many important lessons - the satisfaction of broadening one’s mind, the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and the crushing burden of lifelong student loan debt. If you’re still paying for the bestest four years of your life, you owe it to your students to stress the importance of planning how they’ll finance their education. And since there’s nothing teenagers enjoy more than listening to adults’ advice, Instructify recommends you tell them to visit Bankrate.com’s Countdown to College.
Countdown to College is a month-by-month guide to students’ senior year, with the goal of maximizing grant and scholarship money. Advice includes registering for the SAT or ACT in September, harassing parents in January to file their taxes so kids can submit their darn FAFSA already, and spending February sucking up to civic and church groups who award scholarships.
Yeah, it’s a lot of work to cram into one year. Students are free to start following Countdown to College’s strategies early, of course. But if they’re that on the ball, they probably don’t need the advice.
As for everyone else, Countdown to College breaks up the nebulous concept of securing financial aid into doable monthly tasks. For kids bagging groceries for minimum wage at the local Try-N’-Save, asking total strangers for several thousand dollars probably never sounded so easy. –BILL FERRIS
