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By: Lee Doubleday
Starting a scholarship program at your career training institution is a great idea to help support your students financially, but it takes a lot of time and work behind the scenes. Managing the logistics of budgets and funding, the submission criteria, the collection of applications, the selection process, and the administration of awards can quickly feel overwhelming.
Here are three big areas to consider when deciding whether to start and manage your own scholarship:
Funding
To offer scholarship funding, you have to have funds! Ensuring the availability of scholarship money for each award term is foundational to offering a scholarship. But there are more costs to managing a program than just the disbursement awards: there are plenty of administrative costs to the organization, including the time and labor it takes to ensure a smooth operation.
Mechanics
Determining the criteria for eligibility, creating an application process, selecting the recipients, and arranging for the disbursement of funds are all details that will need to be established and clearly communicated, both to potential applicants and to staff and other stakeholders involved in the process. Let IAF’s experienced scholarship administrators take care of all these details on your behalf!
Time
Managing any kind of program takes time—and scholarships are no different. The total scholarship cycle can take months or even more than a year, from marketing the award to disbursing funds to recipients. Keeping track of the funding and the logistics—ensuring the continued operation of an institutional scholarship program—often falls to a school’s financial aid department or even to just one administrative employee. IAF can save your office hours and hours of time and still allow you to offer your students a $1,000 discount on their tuition.
Let us help!
If it sounds like biting off more than you can chew, the Imagine America Foundation is here to help! You have already got more than enough important tasks to focus on to ensure your school is running smoothly and providing excellent service to your students! Why add something else to your plate unnecessarily? You don’t even need to employ someone to run an institutional scholarship program or divert some of your financial aid department’s valuable time to administering an additional program.
Instead, you can enlist the help from a whole team of experienced and dedicated people to manage an already award-winning scholarship program for you! The Imagine America Foundation has already done all the legwork to establish a fantastic and expanding program so that you can do what you do best: supporting your students’ education.
As a partnership institution with IAF, your students will have access to our three scholarship award programs: the Military Award Program (MAP) for military personnel, the Adult Skills Education Program (ASEP) for adult students, and the Imagine America High School Scholarship Program for graduating high school seniors. We award these scholarships to thousands of students every year, offering them each the opportunity to lower their tuition costs by $1,000.
You will also have the chance to take advantage of IAF’s vast network of partners, who are working every day to match the prospective students they serve with schools like yours who can offer them the hands-on career training they want! The Imagine America Foundation has an established database of high schools, workforce boards, and veterans’ affairs offices—and it is growing all the time. You can quickly establish relationships with our partners without having to spend a bunch of time and money sending representatives to locations across the country to provide demonstrations.
We will list your school and educational programs in resources shared with counselors and advisors all over the country every single month. Promote your programs to high schools, workforce boards, and VA offices quickly and effectively through the Imagine America Foundation.
Contact us today to find out how you can become a valuable partner institution of the Imagine America Foundation—and offer your students three great scholarship programs!
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