The Last College Job You’ll Ever Need
Why applying for scholarships should be a full time job.
The Problem
College is expensive. Really expensive. With costs rising to over $33,480/year at the average private university, it’s no wonder that over 70% of students work during their time in college — 30 hours/week on average.
Unfortunately, it’s not exactly a secret that college jobs don’t pay the best. Employers and universities alike are all too eager to take advantage of hard-working youngsters who don’t have enough “life experience” to justify a higher wage.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour, hardly enough to offset the high cost of a college education. Even if a student works for much more than that, a healthy $12.00/hour, and works a full schedule of 40 hours/week for 52 weeks/year, they’re only making $24,960/year. That’s $34,080 short of four year tuition, not to mention other costs like food or plane tickets back home.
The Solution
Enter private scholarships. With companies giving money to students for everything from who can make the best prom dress out of duct tape to who can give the best advice on surviving a zombie apocalypse, it is no longer true that only star athletes with a 4.0 GPA are eligible to win big.
Despite the tens of thousands of scholarships that are out there, students seem to get discouraged from applying, and some scholarships even go unclaimed. This is because students have the wrong mindset about applying to scholarships. Students view scholarships as a lottery ticket and not as a full time job.
When you switch your mindset and view applying for scholarships as a supplement to or replacement for a job, the numbers start to add up.
Let’s take the bread-and-butter scholarship as an example — $1,000 to go to any school in the USA. For many students, $1,000 seems to small to be worth it, but consider the time saved. For the hypothetical student working $12/hour, a $1,000 scholarship is worth the same as 83 hours of work.
We’ll make a few conservative estimates here to get a rough idea of the profitability of applying for scholarships. First, you win 5% of scholarships you apply for. Second, you only win $1,000 scholarships. Third, it takes two hours to write a scholarship essay. Fourth and finally, each essay can be recycled for five different scholarships.
To win $1,000 in this scenario, you need to apply to twenty scholarships by writing four different essays. At two hours per essay, that’s eight hours total, for an hourly rate of $125/hour. That’s over 10 times what you were making before!
The Disclaimer
Obviously, those numbers are made up, and they vary from person to person. In my experience, however, all of those numbers are very conservative. Essays don’t take that long to write, they can be reused many times, and of course many scholarships are more than $1,000.
That being said, the point still remains. The payout from scholarships is so huge that it would be a waste of time not to apply. Who knows — if you start treating applying for scholarships like a full time job, maybe you’ll increase your hourly, too.
Share and comment below!
