Scholarship U

Grades, test scores seem too low for a scholarship? Family earns too much? Competition too fierce? One expert has ideas to ease your worries.

By Dollars and amp; Sense John Ewoldt

Last update: February 21, 2006 - 6:06 AM

It's the nightmare of anyone who's college-bound. Your parents sit you down one day for a heart-to-heart. "Sorry, kid, there's no college fund."

For Jason Lum, 33, it happened when he was a high school senior. After sending Lum and his brother to Catholic school for their K-12 education, his parents said the fund was tapped out. "But make no mistake," his mother said, "you are going to college."

As Lum sat shell-shocked, his mother explained his choices. He could take out loans to pay back after graduation, or he could find people willing to give him scholarship money who would not expect a dime back.

The decision was a no-brainer, but Lum had to work hard for it. Why begin his work life saddled with a five- or six-figure debt? A bit of a self-starter, Lum went on to win $220,000 worth of scholarships from Washington University, Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley. After 10 years of higher education, he left debt-free.

Now a civil rights attorney with a practice in Eden Prairie, Lum also teaches inexpensive community education classes for students and parents on how to win college scholarships.

He dispenses unconventional wisdom that parents and students probably haven't heard from most financial aid officers. Lum tells his students that large scholarship directories and websites such as Fastweb.com are overmined and they should also look to sources not as well-known, especially if they're not 4.0 students.

Brent Polivany of Chanhassen, who attended Lum's Minnetonka class recently, said that it got his creativity flowing. His son, who has been accepted at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, works at Buca restaurant. Polivany said he plans to have his son check into scholarships from his employer. He's also going to check with his mother, who worked for Honeywell for 40 years, to see if her grandson might be eligible for scholarship cash.

Another attendee, Hopkins High School senior Austin Hankey-Brown, was relieved to hear that standardized test scores are often not part of a scholarship application. That's part of Lum's discussion of the five biggest myths about scholarships. Another bombshell? Expensive private schools actually can cost less than public schools because of their larger pool of scholarship money.

Rick Stucki of Victoria attended the class when his daughter was a senior. His daughter is now in the engineering program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Although she got several scholarships, he wished that he'd attended the class when she was a 10th-grader. Lum advises parents and students to broaden their activities in high school with scholarship potential in mind. Stucki's daughter excelled in several sports, but had she been a volunteer, for example, it could have enhanced her scholarship possibilities by one-third.

Lum looks at scholarship money as few do -- debt elimination. His advice serves as the magic potion to ward off becoming a member of what author Tamara Draut calls the "broke generation." In her book "Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead," Draut said that one of the major factors that puts people in their 20s in dire straits is college debt, not extravagant spending. Unfortunately, most students are clueless about the debt potential and the size of the repayment after graduation, said Lum. Many young professionals are stuck with student loan payments that are higher than mortgage payments.

For more information, go to www.scholarlearn.com or call 952-942-7396. For a list of valuable websites in the scholarship hunt, check out Randy Salas' Websearch column today.

jewoldt@startribune.com •612-673-7633. His articles are online at www.startribune.com/dollars.