EducationGrant often hears from single moms who are looking for ideas about going back to school and the financial aid that can help them accomplish this goal. It’s inspiring to see how many single moms are determined to get the higher education they need to create a better quality of life for their families!

Single moms have many factors to balance when it comes to going back to school: scheduling, child care, transportation, time management, college tuition and fees, money for schoolbooks, and keeping children fed, clean, and rested while mothers work, study, or both. (Not sure how they do it all!) It won’t come as a surprise to any single mother that money, or the lack of it, is the biggest worry that most single moms deal with every day. So going back to school can feel like a Catch-22. To earn more money and make your family financially stable, it helps to have a quality college degree. But to get the college degree, you need money.

Even still, finding financial aid isn’t always the first necessity in ideas for single moms going back to school. Another important goal, especially in this bleak economy, is to NOT end up with a lifelong mountain of student loan debt after you’ve graduated.

Are you determined to get your college degree? Here are some ideas on how to get started:

1) Choose a realistic education goal. Are you going back to school so you can qualify for a particular job or change your career? What’s the average pay for the new career? (How about the pay for an entry-level worker?!) Will this industry still need workers once you’ve graduated?

2) Comparison-shop for the best accredited school and program for your needs. When considering schools, keep these factors in mind:

• Where is the school? Can you get to its campus easily by public transportation if you don’t have a car? How long is your commute?
• How much time on campus will the program require? Will you be able to get child care to cover the time you want to devote to your classes and schoolwork? (Besides federal financial aid, look for grants and scholarships that provide funding for child care and other living expenses.)
• Would an accredited online program work better for you?
• Is there an admissions representative at the school that can tell you about the program and what it will require from you?
• How much does the program cost? What fees are there in addition to tuition?
• Is there a financial aid officer who can walk you through the financial aid process? Does the school have education grants for single moms? (If not, maybe consider a different school.)

3) Fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

• This application opens the door to all federal financial aid, such as Pell Grants and low-cost student loans, as well as single mom education grants from individual schools and states.
• Federal and state financial aid can be used for any accredited higher education program registered with the U.S. Department of Education as a “Title IV” school. These include community colleges, state universities, and online programs in addition to traditional 4-year schools.
• You don’t need to be accepted or enrolled in a school before you submit your FAFSA. All you have to do is list the school(s) you’ve applied to. You’ll get a report back that tells you how much money you’ll be expected to contribute to your degree costs, and the school(s) will use that number to determine how much financial aid they can offer you. If you qualify for a Pell Grant, you’ll get one automatically.

4) Consider choosing the school that will allow you to graduate with the least amount of debt.

Single mothers do it all, and both the news and personal family histories are filled with countless stories of single moms whose children remember and honor them as role models and heroes. A college degree may be your ticket to the quality of life you want your children to have, but only if it doesn’t leave you worse off financially than you were before.

For more college planning details, see the earlier blog-post, How to Prepare for the FAFSA: 3 Pre-FAFSA Steps. You can also find more information about the FAFSA, scholarships for single moms, scholarships for women, adult learning scholarships, and low-cost student loans in earlier blog posts and the grants, loans, and scholarship pages in this site.

And if you have other tips and ideas for single moms going back to school, please share them here in the comments. The very best advisors for single moms are… other single moms!

News stories this week reported that contributions from wealthy donors will result in new college grants and loans for students in Kentucky, New York, Ohio, and West Virginia. The money probably won’t be available until next year, but the opening bell for the 2010 FAFSA is only 6 weeks away, anyway.

One happy recipient of a generous financial aid donation is the University of the Cumberlands in Williamsburg, Kentucky. The Charles E. Schell Foundation awarded the University a $100,000 grant to be used for interest-free student loans. To be eligible, college students will need to be citizens of Ohio, Kentucky, or West Virginia (or some unspecified adjoining states), between the ages of 18 and 25, with a minimum 2.0 GPA on a 4.0 scale.

A little research on the Charles E. Schell Foundation shows that the Foundation has awarded many such grants to dozens of schools in the region, including Ivy Tech Community College, Midway College, Union College, Denison University, Oakland University, University of Evansville, and Shawnee State, to name just a few. If you’re a college student in this part of the country, you should check with your financial aid office about whether your school may have the same interest-free loan program. Clearly, the Charles E. Schell Foundation is a generous supporter of higher education.

And numerous news publications reported a new $200 million grant from investment bank Goldman Sachs to provide scholarships for business students at community colleges. The first school to get money for scholarships will be La Guardia Community College in Queens, New York, but the plan is to roll out business education scholarships to other local community colleges as well. Goldman Sachs also apologized for its contribution to the collapse of the economy a year ago, but said that the apology and its new scholarship program were not necessarily related. But The New York Times could not resist mentioning that Rolling Stone Magazine has referred to Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” so now, regretfully, I can’t resist either. The scholarships are a good idea, though.

Here’s an excellent quick overview of financial aid from yesterday’s Tampa Bay Informer (”The Good News Newspaper”). Written by María Corral, “College and Financial Aid: Myths and Facts” distills the longwinded complexity of college funding down to 4 financial aid myths and myth-busters. Once these facts are clear, the details are easier to grasp.

It may just be from the chronic strain of the recession, but recent news stories have featured students who have found unusual ways of paying for college. These college finance solutions are not for everyone, but they’re interesting.

“In the Altogether,” an article in the New York Times, describes one Penn State student’s job as a nude model for art classes (you may need to create a quick NYT log-in to see this article). At $15 an hour, the part-time modeling work is double the pay of any other typical work-study job. It sounds as though the worst part of this unusual way of paying for college may be feeling as though you’re not always accurately represented in the art students’ sketches.

Over in England, Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a respected cancer researcher and neurotoxicologist, revealed that six years ago she worked as a high-class call girl in order to earn the money she needed for living expenses while she was trying to complete her Ph.D. in forensic pathology. Her unusual way of paying for college inspired her to keep a blog, which later turned into a book and a TV series in addition to allowing her to complete her doctorate program and earn her Ph.D.

Between the start of the school year and Veterans Day, there’s been a lot in the news about improving college education benefits for our veterans and their families. The Post-9/11 GI Bill was launched in August, but it’s gotten off to a rocky start in spite of welcome new features such as the transferability of benefits. The database problems will get fixed, but both funding delays and program loopholes have left veterans in the lurch.

On Veterans Day, four veterans enrolled in online college education programs wrote eloquently in The Huffington Post about their frustration and disappointment with a misguided housing policy in the new GI Bill. Click on the title to read this excellent article:

• New G.I Bill Still Lags Behind the Times, by Eric Baylor, CTR2(SW), John J. Cronin, USMC/RET., Margaret Varela, and Kenneth Wilson

Let’s hope legislation filed recently by Congressfolks Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and Bob Filner of California will close loopholes and make college education benefits more consistent across all the GI Bills. (Download a summary of most recent legislation here.)

The Boston Globe today profiled an organization that can help when the GI Bill program is not enough. The Massachusetts Soldiers Legacy Fund raises money through private donations to provide college education benefits to the children of veterans who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. How the MSLF got started and what it has been able to accomplish is a moving story.

Financial scams that seek college students the way great white sharks seek seals are back in the news again. Some scams are tried and true; some are new. Whichever one comes after you, don’t take the bait.

For an update on scams to watch out for, read Kim Clark’s article, “6 Scams That Target College Students,” over at U.S. News & World Report. She provides an interesting refresher on who sees you their favorite prey.

The scams that really stand out are the ones that try to reel you in with scary letters. These official-looking mail advertisements and letters use dramatic and urgent come-ons to make you think you could be in trouble, somehow. (Sounds similar to the email you get from financial frauds, illegally using your own bank’s real logo in the email to trick you into thinking there’s a real problem with your account.)

Any mail or email that claims you have to “Act now!” and “Before It’s Too Late” because “Time is Running Out,” but all you have to do is hand over some money, should be treated with caution. If you’re wondering if the mail you’ve received could be legitimate, talk to the financial aid advisors at your school.

And just because it’s Friday, here’s a gem on scams from the Federal Trade Commission…

Sometimes the hard part about embarking on a new goal is knowing where to begin. Going back to school is a worthy goal, but with today’s high college tuition and complicated financial aid system, it can require more planning than it seems. For instance: the FAFSA. Understanding how to prepare for the FAFSA seems like a good place to start your back-to-school plan, but actually, the real beginning is a couple of steps before that.

Here are 3 pre-FAFSA steps to prepare you for financial aid applications.

1) Define your education objective.

• Are you interested in a career-focused education program that will prepare or certify you for a specific career or job? (Examples of these include a professional diploma in culinary arts or paralegal studies, an associate degree in nursing or medical assistance, and a bachelor’s degree in accounting.)
• Or are you looking forward to obtaining a 4-year university degree to enhance your life or advance the career you’re settled in? These objectives are equally worthy—it just helps to have an objective clearly defined at the start, even if you revise your plan down the road.

2) If your education objective is earning a certificate or degree for a new career, do a little research on the salary and working environment you can expect in that job.

• Look for the career or job you’re considering on CourseAdvisor.com or the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupation Handbook website. These sites can give you information on how much you’re likely to earn, the typical work-hours, typical tasks, what kind of education and training is required, and how much demand there will be for that job over the next 10 years.
• These details are important because they can help you decide how much it makes sense to pay for the education and training the job requires (how much bang you’ll get for your buck).
• If demand for the job is dropping, you may change your mind about going to school for it unless you live in an area where there is still a need for that occupation.
• Or, if the career’s average pay is low, you’ll have that in mind when you start considering the price of education programs.

3) Do a little comparison-shopping between education programs.

• Now that you know what kind of education program you’ll need to achieve your objective and how much you’re likely to earn in the job you’ll qualify for after you graduate for, you can get an idea of a reasonable amount to spend on college tuition.
• You may get financial aid to cover most of the cost, but if you have to take out loans, most financial aid experts say you should base how much you borrow on how much you’ll earn after graduation, so you don’t drown in debt. (Here’s where the research on average salary is helpful.)
• Liz Pulliam Weston at MSNBC Money recommends that you limit your student loan(s) to an amount that will cost you no more than 10% of your expected monthly gross income after you graduate.

The goal of these 3 pre-FAFSA steps is to define what you want to accomplish in school and get an idea of what your chosen program is likely to cost. Having this information will help you prepare for how much financial aid you’ll need after your FAFSA is processed.

What is financial aid for nontraditional college students? Is it different from financial aid for traditional students who go straight from high school to college each fall?

Nontraditional Student Week

November 1-7, 2009, is Nontraditional Student Week, an annual recognition of nontraditional students in the college world. Nontraditional Student Week is sponsored by the Association for Non-Traditional Students in Higher Education, an international organization that advocates for adult learners.

What exactly is a nontraditional student? Believe it or not, there is still no “official” higher education definition, even though a college head-count from the National Center for Education Statistics suggests that 70% of all U.S. college students are age 25 and up (6.8 million students).

A general definition of a nontraditional student is one who doesn’t follow the path that goes straight from high school to college at age 18. Nontraditional students are also referred to as nontraditional learners and adult learners (because they are usually adults who have been in the workforce for at least a year or two if not longer).

Here are some of the characteristics that define nontraditional students (as defined by the NCES and a growing number of higher education officials). You don’t have to meet all these criteria to be considered a nontraditional student—just one is enough. A nontraditional college student is one who:

• Doesn’t go directly from high school to college in the same calendar year
• Is age 24 or older
• Goes to college less than fulltime for at least part of the academic year
• May attend college one or two courses at a time
• Attends college while also working a fulltime job (35 hours or more a week)
• Meets the federal financial aid definition of “financially independent”
• Has dependents other than a husband or wife (usually children, but sometimes others)
• Is a single parent
• May have a GED instead of a high school diploma

Where’s the Financial Aid for Nontraditional Students?

Many nontraditional students might say there’s a big item missing from the list above: A nontraditional college student is one who isn’t eligible for financial aid the way traditional college students are.

In fact, getting financial aid can be a real challenge for adult learners. Although it’s true that federal financial aid (Pell Grants, Stafford loans, and more) doesn’t have an age limit, there are still a number of Catch-22s that tend to apply only to working adults.

For example, since Pell Grants are targeted toward very low-income students, nontraditional students who hold down a even a low-paying job while attending college classes may make just a little too much money to qualify for a Pell Grant.

Adult learners may find themselves ineligible for federal loans for the same reason—even if the paycheck they earn barely covers their living expenses. And there are other criteria (enrollment status and length of time to complete a degree program) that often disqualify nontraditional students from Pell Grants and other federal financial aid.

On the plus side, officials from the Department of Education and Department of Labor are much more aware of the holes between their two sets of rules. They’re working to synch up their departmental policies so that the rules work together rather than conflict with each other.

Nontraditional Students are the Students of the 21st Century

The nontraditional student is the hot college student these days, for a variety of public and commercial reasons. (Educating workers for new industries and getting them back to work is crucial for our economy, but higher education is also a profitable big business.) Nevertheless, conflicting policies on financial assistance aren’t the only holes in the higher education system.

Working Learners, a report from the Center for American Progress proposes an overhaul of higher education to close up those holes and allow nontraditional students to be better served. The report’s suggestions may sound familiar to you, since adult learner advocates have been recommending such changes for years: accessibility, flexibility, more respect for professional certificates, career path coaching.

On the subject of more accessible financial aid for nontraditional students, the report also suggests the creation of a new “Micro Pell Grant” for students “who want to take one course per semester or an occupational certificate.”

It may feel as though the U.S. higher education and financial aid systems are skewed in favor of traditional students in a lot of ways, and they probably are. Not intentionally, just as a result of the influence of earlier times. But the country is going through a big change and this may shift more attention and resources to our huge population of nontraditional students.

As a hat-tip to Nontraditional Student Week, please write in and share your experience as a nontraditional student seeking financial aid. Did you learn any financial aid application tips you could pass on other students? We would love to hear from you!

EducationGrant launched a new Facebook Fan Page today, with the intention of creating a community where students from all walks of life can share their financial aid experiences, questions, and suggestions. We’ve also published our first Scholarship and Grant Guide, which you can learn more about in the Grants section of this site.

In a recent survey, CourseAdvisor.com asked site visitors about their most important concerns about attending college and the sources they investigated for getting the information they needed.

Almost half of the survey respondents (most of whom were age 25 and up) cited paying for college as their most pressing concern and more than 35% reported using online search engines as their primary source of degree and financial aid information.

We’d like EducationGrant.com, with our financial aid news and our scholarship and education grant listings, to become one of those trusted information resources — and we hope our Facebook page will be a forum where students and professionals can exchange financial aid tips and add to, correct, and comment on the usefulness of the information our site provides.

In fact, we’d like EducationGrant to become a college and financial aid conversation whose fans help each other find ways to pay for (and survive!) the higher education experience. Whether you’re here on EducationGrant.com or visiting our Facebook Fan Page, you may find just the financial aid answer you’re looking for!

It’s official: paying for college is on everybody’s mind. The results of two separate studies emerged this week and the consensus is that the cost of tuition concerns both students currently enrolled and those individuals who are still considering going to school. Wildly shocking? No. But, digging deeper into the findings reveals some interesting new insight.

According to CourseAdvisor, who conducted one of the studies and is this blog’s sister site, 43% cited the ability to pay for school as their top concern about attending school. eLearners, a site that provides resources to online learners, also found that 95% of Americans not currently in school see the potential cost of tuition as the biggest obstacle in returning to school, with women shouldering more of the worry about the financial investment than men.

CourseAdvisor found that 40- to 50-year-olds rely on government Web sites like Federal Student Aid to find information and educate themselves on financial aid — two times more than those under 24 years old, who rely on a combination of guidance counselor advice and research done through search engines.

“Affordable” isn’t necessarily a word that many people associate with “college tuition,” but educating yourself on the variety of grants, scholarships and programs available can certainly help alleviate some of the anxiety associated with the cost of tuition.

Aside from our blog (obviously!) where do you get your financial aid information? Has researching all of your funding options helped you put together a solid game plan that makes paying for college less overwhelming? Let us know in the comments!