Reducing the Cost of College is Possible with a Parent-led Plan

Put an Academic Plan Together to Cut Student Loans

According to a report by National Public Radio, college “students are borrowing more money to pay for college than ever before. New data shows that students who graduated in 2010 carried 5 percent more debt than in the previous year. And education debt is expect to grow in the coming years, as students struggle to pay higher tuition costs.”

This does not bode well for current high school student-athletes, especially those who will not be in the position to be offered full athletic grant-in-aid scholarships. And, surprising to many parents, such is the case with a majority of college bound student-athletes.  Since the NCAA limits the number of athletic scholarships in all sports and mandates that only a few of those which are fully funded by Division I colleges be offered as “full rides,” the result is that families face having to take out loans to supplement the “partial” athletic awards their children may earn.

The economic counter balance for families rests largely on two determinants: 1) The need-based money their child may be eligible to receive through state and federal grants such as the Pell Grant; and 2) the academic award they can potentially earn via their child’s combined academic performance, i.e., their core course grade point average, class rank and standardized test scores. While grant funding is more or less set in stone due to the family’s financial status, the amount awarded through academics is something which the student can directly control.

Parents must address the academic issue with their children early in their high school career if they collectively want to influence the financial impact of college expenses. In the NPR report, Lauren Asher, who tracks loan amounts for the Project on Student Debt, a California-based non-profit organization, asserted that the debt of the average student upon graduation in 2010 was $25,250. To make matters worse, the cost of college tuition is rising annually. In the past year alone, tuition rose five percent on average. The group’s data was extracted from over 1,000 not-for-profit institutions. Moreover, Asher says that in for-profit colleges “loans tend to be much higher.”

To minimize the financial hit families might otherwise expect to take, student-athletes should understand that at the end of their high school careers a full scholarship is not necessarily waiting for them. By developing a sound academic plan for their children, however, families stand a very good chance of cutting into the amount of student loans with which their children may eventual be burdened.

A key strategy is to change the way student-athletes approach their class work and homework. Doing merely enough to get by is not adequate and will not make a significant impact. And, mid-range grades will not do the trick, either. To make a serious dent in that potential loan amounts, student-athletes should have an detailed academic plan in place including a firm commitment to a specific number of study time away from the classroom. Eliminating distractions at home should be a big part of this plan. One solution is for the entire family to participate by eliminating all distractions in the home including television, digital gaming and phone activities such as texting and Facebook or other social media involvement during certain hours of the evening and/or weekends.

This long-range approach will provide short-term benefits as well.  But, the end game is to reduce the amount of loans your child will have to repay upon college graduation.  Academic performance is the ticket to a loan-less education.