The news is bad. Whether you have a college degree or not, its not pretty. You’re lucky if you have a job – and there are many well-educated, smart, capable people out of a job, unemployed – due to the general downward trajectory of the economy. So here’s a proposal that I think needs to be thought about a bit more.
Instead of the chants of “Global” “Global” that we’ve gotten used to over the last several years – we should look inward “Local” “Local”. That does not mean we should adopt an isolationist approach – I’m talking about the local (city – town) outlook and not on a national scale.
The problem is that we don’t have jobs and companies are moving jobs overseas. Cities face dwindling tax revenues and that’s going to get worse if there are less jobs (less jobs = less spending = less tax revenue). So if we can come up with a solution that allows cities to provide their young residents college grants to local universities and maybe even in partnership with private universities to foster a better society for their own city that would be great.
For example, a city can provide say cover 50% of the cost of going to an in-state institution with the condition that the student will work for the city for a few years or atleast stay in the city and find a local job. I know this is not the greatest idea, and it definitely needs a lot of revision and thinking – but I’m not above throwing out a less-than-perfect idea to foster debate.
The rough idea is that we should focus on developing strong local economies that will in turn have a positive affect on the national economy. That can be achieved through a partnership between local companies, municipalities and educational institutions all of which have a stake and interest in their local economy functioning well. Why? Because increasing multinationals will intrude on the space of local companies.
If we can develop a nice system that levels the playing field somewhat and fosters partnership between these 3 key areas – it would go a long way in making our economic woes better and it might take longer and the climb might be harder but it will be a permanent victory and not a temporary one.
October 24th, 2011 in
Brainstorming Ideas,
Community Grants,
Free Private Grants,
Frugal Student,
Local Grants,
Paying for College,
Scholarships,
State Grants,
Tips For School Grants | tags:
Local Grants,
local scholarships |
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For any student (undergrad or grad) or high school senior looking for scholarships, Google can be one daunting place.
Its a jungle out there! and if you go by what “experts” say you’ll find as many myriad opinions as the number of universities and colleges that exist out there.
So we here at Private School Grants decided to do a little research of our own, and we’ll share the “expert” opinions (both human and robot) and then give you our take. But for those if us who are not familiar with such search engines – a quick intro is needed.
Essentially, scholarship search engines (the FREE ones!) allow you to search for grants and scholarships according to your preferences, needs, major, etc. Its one of the most powerful resources you can utilize. Some are more advanced than others, some are more regularly updated then others. From our standpoint (the student – always!) there’s only one thing to consider: How many can you find in the shortest amount of time that you can apply for? That’s it – that’s the qualification we want to look at.
#1 Choice of the Search Engines:
The search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) will most often give you: Scholarships.com the reason to SEO people is obvious (their name is their keyword). To the rest of us – it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily the best, but they do have the smartest name on the block.
#1 Choice of US News & World Report:
US News and World Report is well known for ranking colleges and universities according to different criteria. So its no surprise they have a ranking on top scholarship search engines as well. They go with College Board
#1 Choice from Forbes:
Forbes – the home page of business leaders – a stellar business magazine and website well-known for its “Best of the Web” series and “Lists” such as the Forbes 400 ranks Scholarship Experts as the best scholarship search engine.
Are you ready for our choice – our pick – here it is…
#1 Choice of Private School Grants:
We’ve focused on that one thing that we believe in all along: not fancy graphics, not streamlined searching – and these are valid evaluation points – but for us its the nitty-gritty and based on that our #1 choice is Fastweb
I don’t want to get into details and waste your time about the pros and cons of each but suffice it to say that all of the above are great, excellent and free resources.
If you have the time you should regularly check up on each of them. Pick a day and assign it to a particular site, keep one that you check more often, that you find easier to use and navigate and stick with it.