What scholarships do students from Monroe County, Mich., actually win?

Here are some examples from a big pile of scholarship announcements I’m typing up for future print and e-editions of The Monroe Evening News:

• A $250 scholarship intended for a public high school graduate majoring in political science, history or education at Monroe County Community College and residing in the Michigan District 56 House of Representatives. The scholarship honors the late State Representative Herb Kehrl, and if you remember his career, this is a good description of his interests.
• A $106 scholarship awarded to MCCC full-time students majoring in pre-engineering, electronics or computer technology. The sponsor is Spartan Steel Coating, which explains the majors that are encouraged.
• A $1,000 scholarship to MCCC that is intended for someone who was home-schooled or is working at least 30 hours a week. This year’s award was won by someone who graduated from high school in 1996, is married and has children. He intends to get a degree in business management.
• A $2,000 scholarship for a Monroe student who is attending college in Indiana. She won this award through a national scholarship program is intended for children, grandchildren and legal dependents of independent truck drivers. As part of the application, the winners had to write a 500-word essay about the professional truck driver in their family and how to improve the public image of professional truck drivers.
• A $500 Women in Science scholarship for a Monroe girl who plans to study exercise and health science / chemistry at Alma College. This particular scholarship is available to any Monroe County high school female graduate.

Now, here is the point I have made repeatedly about scholarships and college financial aid:

Those who have the money make the rules. As a result, there is no “fairness” to the system in that everyone who fits a certain grade point average, test scores, or household income bracket automatically gets any money.

Even those “Michigan Promise” awards won’t do you any good if you attend college out-of-state. Yes, that’s right. My daughter was in the class of 2007 and the state of Michigan changed the rules starting with that graduation class: no money for out-of-state studies, regardless of test scores.

Well, as it turns out, my daughter attends college in Indiana – and gets none of that “promise” money. There’s nothing we can do about that situation. The state of Michigan makes the rules because the state of Michigan has the money.

It is up to you, the students or parents, to find the scholarship and financial aid programs that fit your circumstances in any given year, and apply for every single program that may work out for you.

But, as you can see from these and other examples I’ve written about (archive keyword: college), Monroe County students who are in a variety of circumstances actually do win a variety of scholarships.

So if you have someone in the family who hopes to be applying for scholarships, pay close attention to the newspaper announcements of who earned what awards. If you see notices that may be of interest to you, clip out those newspaper articles and save them.

Now you have some leads on which announcements to be watching for when application season starts.