Paying for education: Grants

0:00- [Instructor] In this video, we're gonna go into a little bit more detail on grants. And just as a little bit of a refresher, grants, when we're thinking about financial aid, this is money that's literally given to you to pay for college. It's not like a loan that you have to pay back, so grants are things that you want to have as much of as possible.

0:18Now, at a very high level, there's several categories of grants. You have federal grants, and that's actually what I will focus most of this video on. But you also have, I'll list them over here, because I'll focus on federal, have some space there, but you also have state grants that are going to vary by what state you have, and some of them are merit based.

0:40Some of those are going to be need based. You also have what's known as institutional grants, institutional grants. These might come from the college or university where you're applying, and they have a budget, they have some funds set aside to give money to students who meet certain criteria.

0:58And then you have other nonprofits, corporate grants, that will give you money to use towards your college. Now, there's a lot of variation in these. We could do whole videos on each of them, but I'm gonna focus on federal, because that's common, at least to everyone in the country.

1:15Now, the most typical, or maybe I would say the most common, or maybe most known federal grant, is the Pell Grant. I was a Pell Grant recipient when I was in college, and this is need-based. So these are for folks who have pretty significant financial need, based on, I just looked it up, the numbers up before I recorded this video.

1:36At the time of this recording in 2024, the maximum Pell Grant is a little over $7,000. The average Pell Grant given is about 4 or $5,000, and you might say, "Hey, that's a lot less" "than the tuition where I'm going." And then of course, you have to also have room and board, but they can add up, and it can definitely make a difference.

1:58Now, above and beyond Pell Grants, there's also something known as the federal, or known as, Federal Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants, F-S-E-O-G, I guess, FSEOG grants, which are also from the federal government, and they also average around $4,000. Now, the difference between Pell Grants and F-S-E-O-G grants, is that Pell Grants are going to be given to any student in the country who qualifies for them.

2:33While for the F-S-E-O-G grants, there's usually an allocated amount per institution, and so once it runs out at the institution, they're not able to give out more F-S-E-O-G grants. But these are both very important grants if you have a family of need, like my family was when I went to college.

2:52Now, above and beyond that, there's a bunch of other federal programs that try to support and provide incentive for people to serve in parts of society that we need more college-educated folks. A very typical one, or a common one, is the TEACH grant. This is a grant, and it's about the same size, roughly four-ish thousand dollars a year to support someone who is in a teaching program.

3:18And then afterwards, and I won't go into all of the details, will go into low income neighborhoods, and especially in high need, and teach in those for a certain number of years, then they get to keep those grants. If you don't meet those requirements, then it turns into a loan, so you have to be pretty sure that you want to do this.

3:35I guess worst case, it does turn into a loan, but there's also other similar ones for people who go into certain healthcare fields or certain people who go into the military, grants that will pay for your education, but it usually has some service aspect on top of it.

3:48So I'll let you there. The big takeaway, grants are valuable, literally valuable, they are money that you don't have to pay back. Sometimes there are some strings attached, but there are definitely things that you should explore, and if you are able to get many of them, they can add up to a significant chunk of your tuition.