Prize: $5,000. The award may be used for tuition, books or living expenses at any university, college or institution offering accredited business courses and degrees.

Eligibility: Applicants must be eligible to enter the third or fourth year of an undergraduate degree program at an accredited university/college/institute program at the time funds are received from Zonta International Headquarters each November. Applicants must have achieved an outstanding academic record during their first two to three years of academic studies, especially in business-related subjects, and demonstrate an intent to complete a program in business.

Deadline: Varies. Applicants will be submitting materials to their local Zonta Clubs. Most deadlines will fall in April, as Zonta Clubs must submit their scholarship applications to the Zonta District Governor by July 1.

Required Material: Applicants will need to complete a Jane M. Klausman Women in Business Scholarship application and provide the following: two letters of recommendation, an essay in 500 words, and a verification of enrollment.

For the ninth consecutive year, USA Funds has awarded funds to the American Indian College Fund, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the United Negro College Fund. For the third consecutive year, USA Funds also has awarded funds to the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund and the Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund. “Scholarships like the ones supported by USA Funds provide the critical link for students to succeed in higher education,” said APIASF President and Executive Director Neil Horikoshi. “Each scholarship not only changes the life of a deserving student, it contributes to a stronger America.”

During the past nine years, USA Funds has awarded more than $3 million to national scholarship organizations that promote higher education access for minority students. “These organizations are successfully making a difference in the lives of the students they serve by helping them realize their dreams of postsecondary education,” said Robert C. Ballard, USA Funds senior vice president, program and corporate development. “In keeping with USA Funds’ nonprofit mission to enhance access to higher education, we are pleased to support these organizations and their scholarship programs.”

(originally posted at www.pnnonline.org)

“We know the value of good teachers, and we’re committed to encouraging scholars who want to teach vital STEM subjects,” said Jeniffer Harper-Taylor, Vice President of the Siemens Foundation and graduate of Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA. “Our Siemens Teacher Scholars have shown the type of enthusiasm and drive in science and technology that will inspire our next generation of innovators to pursue their dreams.”

Mehrin Gadit, a senior Biology/Secondary Education major at York College, City University of New York, visited P.S. 120 in New York City to conduct her Siemens Science Day with fourth graders. “This was my first time interacting with students of this age, better yet my first time teaching them,” she said. Mehrin’s experiment helped students gain an understanding of how botanists define fruits, and about plant reproduction. “It is great that students get to exercise science by doing and discovering their own knowledge, instead of teachers lecturing to them. Inquiry-based lessons open up the mind of the student, letting them explore their options,” she said.

“The Siemens Foundation’s investment in increasing the pipeline of highly-qualified minority teachers in STEM fields directly addresses the national call to higher education to produce the caliber of students that will shape the future,” said Dr. N. Joyce Payne, Founder, Thurgood Marshall College Fund. “Thurgood Marshall College Fund is proud to join efforts with the Siemens Foundation that has a long history of support of excellence in education, particularly in science and mathematics.”

Morayo Adebiyi, a junior biology major at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, described her Siemens Science Day at nearby middle school: “I purposely targeted a school where the students were not performing well in the areas of science and math. My idea was to help these students develop a passion for these subjects and allow them to apply what they learned to their everyday lives.” Morayo’s activity helped students learn about elasticity and kinetic energy. Students learned how the height from which a ball is dropped affects how high it bounces. Students also learned about averaging and graphing. She brought a basketball to class so that the students could apply these topics to a game they all know and love. “This experience allowed me to be aware of the immediate need for passionate teachers in my community,” she said.

(originally posted at www.pnnonline.org)

Other interesting findings include:

• Nearly 35% of potential employers found eyebrow-raising content that caused them to pass up on a candidate. Scholarship-granting executives had similar experiences.
• The top reason [over 50% of the respondents] for questioning a candidate was that the person posted provocative or inappropriate photographs or information.
• Also on the list were candidates who posted content about them drinking or using drugs and candidates who bad-mouthed their previous employer, co-workers, and/or clients.
• Another interesting effect of the social networking trend is the growing prevalence of Internet slang and emoticons in professional communication. Nearly one-in-six employers have disregarded candidates because they sent a message using an emoticon during the hiring process.

In a similar survey of  scholarship-granting officials conducted by Scholarship-Options staff, the resulting statistics were nearly identical to those discovered by CareerBuilder’s survey.  In each case, scholarship application reviewers were astonished by the lack of professionalism, poor spelling and grammar, and posted indisrecsions found on web sites like FaceBook, Hi5, BeBo, etc.

Everyone applying for a scholarship, especially at the national or regional level should be aware that they are competing against hundreds and maybe thousands of other qualified candidates… make sure that your electronic foot-print is clean and engaging!

• Research applicable scholarships online (e.g., www.scholarship-options.com)
• Organize scholarships by deadlines – setup a calendar!
• Review the scholarships’ requirements
• Set up interviews (if required)
• Prepare any portfolio (if required) - and think about making an “electronic version” of your portfolio
• Request reference letters (Many sponsors will want them. Make sure you give your references adequate time to prepare. You will most likely receive a better quality reference this way.)
• Request or print any special application forms – if the application form is in COLOR… then print it out in color!
• Fill out first application (in chronological order by deadline – remember that you must “live by…” that calendar you setup earlier)
• Research and write essay (if applicable)
• Review and edit all pieces of application
• Make copies of all pieces of application
• Submit application in requested form (i.e., e-mail, snail-mail, etc.)
• Check with sponsor to verify they received your application and all documents
• Move on to next chronological application

By keeping to there simple steps – the process of applying for awards becomes increasingly easier over time.  And your success rate will go up!

The authors share the details of that story now not because it is interesting or compelling — though it is — but because they believe it sheds light on a timely problem facing other colleges as the federal government is again poised to change its approach to calculating student loan default rates. Beginning in 2014, colleges will be judged based on the proportion of federal loan borrowers who begin loan repayments in a given fiscal year and who default on their loans within three years, up from the current two. Institutions with cohort default rates above a certain threshold risk losing their access to federal loan or grant funds, and the change in the formula is expected to put significantly more institutions at risk.

Among those most likely to be affected are for-profit colleges, which on average have the highest default rates now. Leaders in the career college sector have long objected that default rates are a seriously flawed indicator of the quality of institutions — a point argued forcefully in 2008 research by Indiana University scholars and commissioned by the Career College Association; the research generally argued that individual student traits (income, etc.) mattered more than institutional factors, such as institutional type (public vs. private, for-profit vs. nonprofit, etc.), levels of students’ borrowing, etc. Those arguments, which the Career College Association put forward in 2008 to oppose a Congressional proposal at the time that would have toughened the government’s law on default rates even more than the one ultimately adopted, caught the attention of Education Sector’s Erin Dillon, one of the authors of the new report. She was struck, she said in an interview Monday, that the career college study seemed to “argue that it was not appropriate to hold institutions accountable” for their default rates, because the low rates were so directly attributable to the fact that the institutions disproportionately educated students from low-income backgrounds.

Education Sector explores those assumptions in two main ways. First, by recounting in detail the story of how 12 historically black colleges and universities in Texas and nearby states lowered their default rates from 1999 to 2002 to avoid losing their eligibility for financial aid, the authors hope to provide “powerful evidence that institutional practice can make a different in determining a school’s default rate, even for schools that enroll high percentages of low-income and first-generation students,” Dillon and her co-author, Robin V. Smiles, write.

The institutions in question, which included small private institutions such as Jarvis Christian College and Texas College and public ones such as Texas Southern University, worked closely with Texas Guaranteed, a student loan guarantor, to form the Texas Historically Black Colleges and Universities Default Management Consortium, through which they collaborated to create default management teams, changed their financial aid packaging strategies, and strengthened their efforts at retaining students, among other practices.

“The major takeaway from this is that institutional practices do matter,” Smiles said. Added Dillon: “The big lesson for for-profit institutions is that these institutions were able to decrease their default rates [more] than other institutions that enroll very similar student populations. Instead of blaming your default rates on the students you enroll, there are actually steps you can take” to lower those rates.

The second part of the Education Sector analysis — which meshes 2007 Education Department data on cohort default rates with data on students and institutions from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System — was inspired directly by Indiana’s review of existing research for the Career College Association, which was flawed, the authors say. Most previous studies on defaults treated the question of whether a student graduated from an institution as solely a student trait, rather than as an institutional characteristic. “But research on graduation rates clearly illustrates that institutional practices and programs can moderate, and in some cases, overpower, the role of income, race, or other prior education in determining students’ outcomes,” the authors write. “By categorizing graduation as only a student characteristic, the existing research overstates the influence of student background on a student’s likelihood to default.”

The Education Sector analysis, like the previous studies, finds that student demographics “are a significant predictor of cohort default rates,” the authors write. “But we did not find that they are the sole predictor … or even the primary predictor.” Institutions with large proportions of Pell Grant recipients — a leading indicator of having a low-income student body — and heavy enrollments of underrepresented racial minorities tended to have higher default rates, the Education Sector researchers found. “Even after controlling for these student characteristics, though, an institution’s ability to retain and eventually graduate its students emerged as an important factor in determining that institution’s cohort default rate, regardless of the types of students it enrolls,” the report found. “Both a higher retention rate and a higher graduation rate predicted lower default rates among four-year institutions, and higher retention rates predicted lower default rates among public two-year institutions. Surprisingly, though, neither retention rate nor graduation rate were significant predictors among for-profit colleges.”

Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, said via e-mail Monday that officials of the group did not have time to review the Education Sector report’s methodology to decide “whether we agree with the conclusions about how much default variance is explained by external factors (e.g., nature of student population, state of economy) as compared to factors over which an institution has more control.” Miller’s “initial reaction,” he said “is that the analysis underplays the significance of the student risk factors of students who attend community colleges, minority serving institutions, and career colleges. And the career college group agrees, Miller said, “that students, institutions, lenders and the government working together can assist students in preventing defaulting on loans. That is why CCA has had a Default Prevention Initiative in place for eight years that meets regularly with the [Education] Department to share best practices with other institutions and the Department that help address student default.”

The extent to which institutions have control over their default rates, the Education Sector researchers argue, also makes it incumbent on them to sustain their focus on the problem. The consortium that helped the historically black colleges in Texas avert a crisis a decade ago “is less active and campus awareness of default prevention is less acute” today, the Education Sector report says, and “the rate has come back up at some schools.” With rates certain to rise for virtually all colleges when the default calculation shifts to three years from two, those institutions, and others, could once again be at risk unless they redouble their efforts.

(originally published in insidehighered.com)

Degree Programs: If you have already figured out what your major is, definitely look at colleges that are strong in that program. If you have no idea what you want to study, choose a school with a wide range of degree programs to explore and eventually choose from.

College Type: Private, public, religiously affiliated, single-sex or co-ed – there are many types of colleges and all offer benefits and drawbacks. Consider carefully who you are and where you will fit in.

Student Body: Do you want a college where you’ll be surrounded by students similar to yourself, or are you looking for change and diversity? College brochures and websites will provide student demographics such as male-to-female ratio, average student age, and geographic, ethnic and religious diversity.

Size: A tiny liberal arts school and a huge state university will give you two very different college experiences. Visiting large, medium and small schools will help you get a feel for which size is best for you.

Learning Environment: Consider factors like a college’s average class size, student-to-teacher ratios and whether mainly professors or graduate assistants teach classes. Think about what type of learning environment suits you best. Do you learn better through discussions or through hands-on activity? All of these are factors that will impact your academic experience at college.

Distance from Home: Some students want to move far afield. Others want to stay in familiar territory. How far from home do you want to be? Some students want and need to have the support of friends and family nearby. Others want to experience life in an entirely new part of the country.

Location: Do you want the center of activity to be your college and the small town it is in, or are you seeking a major metropolitan area where you’ll enjoy the benefits of city living? Do you like it hot or cold? Snow in the winter, or swimming? Beach or mountains? You get to choose some of these things as you go off to college.

Campus Life: What do you want your college experience to be like outside of the classroom? What is important to you in terms of extracurricular activities, social life, school spirit and traditions and housing options?

Cost: Do not limit your college search because of costs – financial aid and scholarships can do a lot to offset cost differences between two colleges. For first-generation students there may also be merit aid. Think realistically about how your education will be funded, and find schools that work within your financial circumstances.

First Impressions: When you have narrowed your selection, visit the top two or three colleges you are considering. Spend some time on campus talking to students. Sit in on a class and grab a cup of coffee in the student union. There is no substitute for being there. It is the best way to get a real feel for a college and decide if it is “the one.” Throughout your college/university search, go with your instincts and believe in first impressions.

(Originally published at http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Phillip_Walters)