College, like life, is expensive. There are many ways to help pay for college. You can take out loans, you can have a bake sale, you can rob a convenience store or a bank (though that is possibly not the best route to take) and you can apply for scholarships. You would think that high schools would make it easy for our kids to find out about the various scholarships available. After all, they have spoonfed them everything else. They should spoon-feed them these options as well. With all of the tuition we have given to the high school, some of us are left with little to give to college. So, help a brother out, please.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Teenagers are not too keen on doing this research on their own. If I said I was going to sell one of my kidneys to make some extra cash, that they would agree to (if they actually took the time to look up from their phones). To ask them to go online to find out about ways to help pay the exorbitant tuitions, nobody is home; literally, no one is home because they most likely went to get Slurpees and I am talking to myself, again.
Instead of harping on the frustration or banging my head against the wall, which already has the shape of my head in it, I decided to come up with some different scholarships that I think my kids, and maybe yours too, would be eligible for. Now, if I only knew how to go about getting the funding.
The Laundry Scholarship: This scholarship would be divided into three categories. Tier 1 is for those teenagers who can only identify the difference between a washing machine and a dryer. Tier 2 is for those who know how to use a washing machine and a dryer, and Tier 3 is for those who have actually done their own laundry for at least one full school year.
The Lazy Scholarship: To be eligible for this scholarship you need to write an essay on the benefits of sleeping late, never getting off the couch and not knowing where anything is in your own kitchen. If you actually submit the essay, you automatically receive the money because most kids are too lazy to even do that, so congratulations.
The Snapchat Scholarship: The prerequisite for eligibility is the ability to create 30 Snapchat stories, with different backgrounds, in 10 minutes or less. You will be disqualified if any of these stories go to relatives, which probably wouldn’t happen anyway because most people over the age of 40 don’t even know what Snapchat is.
The Selfie Scholarship: This is probably going to be the most popular scholarship. Each selfie will be judged on the light and shadow in the photo. If the selfie is of an older person, points will be given if a sagging chin is not visible and if wrinkles are well hidden. Any selfie cannot be taken with someone else applying for the scholarship and if this happens you will be disqualified. If you are too busy taking selfies, then just forget about applying.
The Dinosaur Scholarship: As most teenagers look at their parents like they were born in the age of dinosaurs, this scholarship will require the applicant to write an essay about how difficult it must have been to live in a time before smartphones. The essay must reveal a personal story about the “dinosaur” in question, i.e., the time they got lost and there was no Waze or a pay phone. If the author of the essay doesn’t know what a pay phone is, he must use an encyclopedia to learn its history. If he uses Wikipedia, he will automatically be disqualified from the scholarship.
I really think I am on to something here. Most scholarships are boring applications for smarty pants kids who know how to add and subtract, read “War and Peace” in Latin while standing on their heads and volunteering at a soup kitchen. We need some real-world scholarships. And I am sure they are out there, but I just can’t get my kid to look for them. Here’s hoping your kids are a bit more ambitious.
By Banji Latkin Ganchrow
Banji Ganchrow just can’t come up with a clever bio this week. It could be because she just came home from another riveting TABC hockey game…it could also just be because she is hungry.
