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by Emily

New college grads may face an especially tough time due to the recession.  The growth in anticipated new hires, which is measured twice a year by The National Association of Colleges and Employers, has been slowing since it reached a high in spring 2007, falling almost flat in the fall.  The numbers for spring 2009 show that for the first time in years, businesses actually anticipate hiring fewer college graduates this year than last--22 percent fewer, in fact.  According to The Boston Globe, the business and finance sectors have an even bleaker outlook, as does the northeastern region of the United States.

With this dim hiring picture in mind, soon-to-be college graduates are looking at alternatives to the traditional workforce. Additional education, teaching fellowship programs, and volunteer work are all proving popular. If you're a college student staring graduation in the face, keep in mind the increased competition and start researching and applying sooner, rather than later.

Graduate programs, including ones offered by business schools, are seeing increased enrollment as many students choose to either delay their entry into the workforce or push up their long-term plans to attend graduate school.  Graduate students can potentially land full-tuition fellowships or assistantships, as well as generous scholarship awards.  Many graduate degrees can help recipients become more competitive when they do enter the workforce, even if the economy does not recover substantially.

Similarly, teacher certification programs, such as the popular Teach for America, are seeing an increase in applicants.  These programs offer a stipend, as well as teacher certification, and in some cases a master's degree in education, in exchange for a commitment of one or two years teaching in a low-income school or a high-need subject.  Other programs exist with similar benefits, including teaching fellowships in several major cities such as New York and Chicago.  College students or recent grads who want to teach but don't want to pay for more school may want to consider these options.

Other volunteer programs, like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps, also are seeing more applicants.  Such programs often come with a stipend or living allowance, as well as student loan deferments or even loan cancelation or repayment benefits.  Students can also participate in many of these programs while still in college or while pursuing graduate degrees.  If you're interested in an alternative to the post-collegiate rat race, there's no time like the present to start considering your options.

by Emily

Want a shot at a top fellowship, like the Rhodes scholarship? There may soon be someone on your campus to point you in the right direction. Just like college advisors and career counseling services can help you apply to graduate school or find a job, many schools are hiring fellowship advisors to help students land these competitive awards for graduate study.

Fellowship advising, once found almost exclusively at Ivy League schools, has become a growing trend at unviersities nationwide, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Fellowship advisors get in touch talented and ambitious students on their campuses and help motivate them to seek out and apply for prestigious fellowships, such as the Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, and Fulbright scholarships. Since the common understanding of these programs is that they are exclusively for the best of the best, usually exceptional students at top-ranked universities, many students who could qualify and potentially win don't even think about applying.

Fellowship advisors typically look for students engaged in challenging coursework, research, and extracurricular activities, and encourage them to consider graduate study and fellowship funding. For many, the goal isn't so much to have students at their schools win these prizes, but to help outstanding students define their goals, push themselves, and get the most out of their educations. The process of preparing and competing for a prestigious fellowship can be a huge help to a student, even if he or she doesn't win the award.

High school students who are committed to seeking out all possible academic and scholarship opportunities may want to see if any of their prospective colleges have fellowship advising offices. Current college students, especially freshmen and sophomores, may also want to look into this, as many fellowship programs look at students' entire college careers, not just their last year or two.

Even if your school doesn't offer fellowship advising, you can still compete for, and potentially win, prestigious graduate student scholarships. As with your college scholarship search, seek out opportunities early, and know what's required to apply. Cultivate good relationships with your professors to land excellent letters of recommendation and seize every chance to participate in research projects and extracurricular activities. Even if you don't win the award you want, these activities can help you stand out in the job search and the graduate school application process.

by Emily

Yesterday, President Obama signed into law a bill to expand Americorps, a national service program that provides small stipends to people of all ages engaged in volunteer work throughout the country.  The act, officially known as the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, paves the way for Americorps to grow in size from its present 75,000 volunteers to as many as 250,000 volunteers by 2017.

In addition to creating more volunteer positions, the Serve America Act will also increase the education stipend for volunteers to $5,350, the same amount as Federal Pell Grants.  This will enable more recent graduates and people currently attending college to participate in Americorps programs, which are becoming an increasingly popular alternative to employment in the current economy.

The national service bill, sponsored by Senator Kennedy, quickly made its way through both houses of Congress, receiving bipartisan support, as well as a ringing endorsement from President Obama, who has long been a proponent of community service.  Congress still needs to find funding for Americorps to begin to expand, but a provision to provide an immediate 25% increase in funding to the program was included in Obama's 2010 budget proposal.

by Alexis Mattera

Here at Scholarships.com, all of our resources are geared toward helping students prepare for and afford college educations...not leave them behind. That being said, this new award probably won’t be popping up in our database any time soon.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, announced the inaugural recipients of the Thiel Fellowship, a program that will bestow 24 students with $100,000 each to not attend college for two years and develop business ideas instead. The driving force behind the fellowship is Thiel’s concern about the “irrational” increase in cost and demand for college educations and his belief that certain students would learn more by leaving school than continuing traditional coursework.

Not surprisingly, heated debates have erupted in academic circles – William K. Aulet, managing director at MIT's Entrepreneurship Center, believes the fellowship is sending the wrong message, stating, "To say that you're better off dropping out of school is a gross generalization." – but the fellowship winners have a different outlook: At least two recipients have expressed interest in returning to school at the end of the fellowship and one prospective winner turned down the deal entirely to enroll at MIT, which signals traditional education is still valued.

What do you think about the Thiel Fellowship? Would you be more than willing to apply and leave school if selected or would you prefer to continue your education in the classroom instead?

by Agnes Jasinski

The latest group of Rhodes Scholars was announced by The Rhodes Trust yesterday, with 32 Americans chosen to receive two to four years of study at the University of Oxford in England, all expenses paid.  The Rhodes scholarships were created in 1902 through the will of Cecil Rhodes, who hoped to broaden leaders' minds by exposing them to different cultures, and the first group of Americans entered Oxford in 1904. It is now the oldest international fellowship offered, and the number of applicants who apply make it one of the most competitive academic and merit-based scholarships out there. This year, more than 1,500 students sought their college or university's endorsement into the program, and 805 received those endorsements, just the first step in the application process. The winners will enter Oxford next October.  So how do you apply for the prestigious award?

• Candidates for the award must be endorsed by their college, and any rules or deadlines regarding that endorsement will be set by your Rhodes Scholarship institutional representative.
• In addition to that endorsement, applications will require five to eight letters of recommendation, a personal essay, a certified transcript, a list of activities, photograph, and proof of citizenship. Deadlines fall in October annually, but as the process is involved, it's best to get an early start.
• Committees in 16 U.S. districts across the country invite the strongest applicants to appear for interviews, where questions will explore the information you've given on your application.
• Applicants are chosen based on the following criteria, set forward by Cecil Rhodes: high academic achievement, integrity of character, a spirit of unselfishness, respect for others, potential for leadership, and physical vigor. (You don't need to be a star athlete to fulfill that last criteria, just show a "fondness for sports.")

A group of international students is also chosen annually, with 80 scholars joining the Americans this year. If you're interested in an international experience but aren't interested studying at Oxford, there are hundreds of study abroad opportunities available in nearly every discipline, and nearly every country. Broaden your horizons, and know there are also study abroad scholarships out there to help you fund your time abroad.

by Alexis Mattera

Here at Scholarships.com, our goal is to make finding money for college as easy as possible. Paying the full cost of tuition out of pocket isn’t in the cards for most college-bound students and high-interest loans aren’t the most desirable options for others, meaning some students’ quests for postsecondary degrees must be funded solely by scholarships, grants and fellowships. Can it be done? Of course it can. You just need the right people on your side.

Alaska Governor Sean Parnell recently requested the funding of the incoming Alaska Performance Scholarship program, a nurse training proposal and a handful of other educational priorities from state lawmakers. While Parnell feels students have worked hard to earn state-funded performance-based scholarship dollars and would be "out to dry" without it, senators worry the program could leave rural students behind if aid is distributed unevenly across the state...not to mention create a potential legal problem given the state constitution’s promise of fair education services. Students seeking need-based grants do have the existing AlaskAdvantage program to turn to but it is significantly underfunded. It could, however, gain support through Senate Bill 43, which calls for AlaskAdvantage to receive $7 million of the proposed $21 million in state college scholarship funding on an annual basis.

Will it happen? Our Magic 8-Ball says "cannot predict now" but we hope it goes through for the sake of the many students in need. How are you currently paying for or planning to pay for school? What programs have you found most helpful in securing the funding you need?

by Alexis Mattera

The road to college – once thought to be straight and narrow – is detouring into uncharted territory. It was once expected for all high school seniors to matriculate to an institute of higher education the semester after they graduate but today, many students (and their parents) are considering the notion of taking a year off from formal schooling first.

But what do students do during this time, often called a gap year? Not catching up on “Extreme Couponing” or trying out online dating: Students use this time to volunteer abroad or build their resumes and schools are adopting formal programs allowing incoming freshmen to defer admission for a year to do so. According to the Wall Street Journal, "gap fairs" are becoming just as common as campus job expos. The results? Mixed. While most students end their gap years better prepared to attend college, some get so waylaid that they abandon a collegiate education all together.

It may sound tempting to take a year off to explore the unknown but there are a few confounding variables. First, the price tag is far from alluring – unless you feel $35,000 is a reasonable figure. (The upside is that costs can be defrayed by stipends, grants, research fellowships and scholarships or the agreement to work in a very remote area.) Next, the hazy direction of your future. I won't deny that your late teens and early 20s are the best times to gain life experience but if said experience is going to leave you in debt or questioning once-important educational goals, is taking the time off worth it?

by Angela Andaloro

The decision to attend college is one that everyone arrives at differently. For some, not going to school isn’t an option, be it by their own standards or their parents’; for others, taking the next step in their educational career may have required a little more convincing. I have even heard stories of parents who bribe their kids to go to college with promises of apartments or cars.

While a new ride or a place to call your own might sound tempting, there’s an even more tempting offer out there from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel – the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, which, in exchange for a commitment to not attending college for two years and dedicating themselves entirely to their inventions, Thiel offered each fellow $100,000. The response was overwhelming, as are the opinions floating around the controversial award.

One of the lucky 20 fellows, Dale Stephens, wrote an article for CNN discussing his own feelings toward the idea that real world experience could prove to be more beneficial than a formal education. He discusses his disappointment in the values that are promoted by the college system – a disappointment that resounds on college campuses around the country. He goes on to discuss the possibilities out there for our generation beyond a traditional education, which, as Stephens puts it, are beyond the extremes of “Becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg or mastering the phrase ‘Would you like fries with that?’”

Stephens’ call to seek opportunities beyond the formal educational system may be influenced by his experience as a Thiel Fellow but is an idea that is considered by many current and soon-to-be college students. I myself have heard students complain about feeling as though they aren’t really getting anything out of college. The phrase “I’m never going to use this in real life” is one that’s uttered frequently, but how much truth is there to that? Do you feel that there’s something to be learned in college or is it a societal expectation we’ve come to accept?

Angela Andaloro is a rising junior at Pace University’s New York City campus, where she is double majoring in communication studies and English. Like most things in New York City, her life and college experience is far from typical – she commutes to school from her home in Flushing and took nearly a semester’s worth of classes online – but she still likes to hang out with friends, go to parties and feed her social networking addiction like your “average” college student.

by Alexis Mattera

There's been a lot of talk about Harvard lately – its reinstatement of early action, a graduate winning the Best Actress Oscar, another Winklevoss lawsuit against Facebook, etc. – but this next story doesn’t fall within the boundaries of its ivy-covered campus...and not that far away, either. An arm’s length, shall we say?

Desperate to pay off their children's $20,000 worth of student loans, a Boston-area parent recently posted on Craigslist that he or she was willing to sell their body parts to combat the mounting debt. The posting did not include a name, gender or exact location but listed the "live cadaver" was 5 feet 10 inches tall, 200 pounds and had all organs in working order. "If you eliminate my children's student loans, I will give you my life!" the poster wrote. "Take my blood, take my plasma. Drill into my brain, my leg, my arm. Tap my heart, my liver, my kidney," the poster wrote, adding, "I am very very serious."

There are a lot of options out there to limit exorbitant loans (scholarships, grants and fellowships, to name a few) and consolidation can simplify the loan repayment process by allowing the borrower to combine several types of federal student loans and repayment schedules into one...but selling off one’s body parts piece by piece? We’re all for finding interesting ways to pay for school but this is just plain crazy. Would you ever consider taking this route to keep loan collectors at bay?

Service-minded students have a variety of ways to fund their college education through community service scholarships and other awards. Now, students interested in attending Dickinson College in Pennsylvania can participate in a fellowship program that awards $10,000 towards tuition for each year of full-time public service completed.

The Dickinson College Public Service Fellowships are awarded to high school seniors who are interested in deferring enrollment in college to first work in public service in some capacity. If accepted, students can defer enrollment for up to four years, and receive up to $40,000 in scholarship money through this program. Qualifying public service work can be independent or done through a national service organization, such as AmeriCorps, and can be paid or unpaid. Projects must be devoted to some aspect of improving the human condition or the natural environment.

While these scholarship awards are only offered through one college at present, at least one other school is seeking to encourage students to become engaged in public service before they start actively pursuing their college degrees. According to The Christian Science Monitor, Princeton University has also launched a program to pay for admitted students to first engage in a year-long service project abroad before beginning classes.

Several colleges have recently announced campus-based scholarships for community service. Many other schools also match AmeriCorps tuition awards, and over 1,100 private colleges have also pledged to assist veterans with tuition to acknowledge their service to the country. If you are a high school student hoping to get involved in a large-scale service project, there's more incentive than ever as colleges and scholarship providers continue expanding financial aid awards for locally and globally engaged individuals.