Kaplan, Benjamin R. :

Benjamin R. Kaplan, age 21, won more than two dozen merit-based scholarships while still in high school -- accumulating nearly $90,000 in scholarship money for use at any college. In 1999, he graduated from Harvard debt-free, with virtually the entire cost of his education covered by his scholarship winnings. Kaplan has written numerous articles on the subject, including columns for The New York Times and U.S. News & World Report.

Let The Games Begin

In the twentysomething movie Reality Bites, a jobless and penniless college valedictorian named Lelaina Pierce (played by the charming Winona Ryder) discovers, among other things, just how much mini-mart food she can buy on her father's gas card. And back in early 1994, when the movie was in theaters, I found myself in a related predicament. No, it wasn't that I shopped at the corner gas station. Nor did I regularly eat Chevron cuisine.

Rather, it was that, as a junior in high school, reality had just bitten me -- and bitten me hard. It happened one day, as I was leafing through glossy college catalogs with dreams of wild collegiate adventures dancing in my head. All of a sudden, I felt the reality of having to pay for my undergraduate education sink its ugly teeth. I hoped to attend a top university, but how would I ever pay the sixfigure tab at the college of my choice? Even if I could somehow cover the cost, was I destined to be buried alive beneath a mountain of student debt?

Granted, this wasn't a memorable scene from a slick Hollywood movie, but still, it was my life. And unlike Lelaina, I didn't have my father's gas card... and even if I did, the corner Chevron station didn't have any diplomas for sale.

Reality Bites... But It Doesn't Have To

A magical gas card never did come to my rescue. But I suppose, in a strange way, a benevolent credit card did save the day. You see, one day at my high school's career center, I came across an application for a nationwide scholarship contest sponsored by the Discover Card corporation. As I held the application in my hands, my mind raced with questions. Were there a lot of merit-based scholarships like this one? Could I win them? Did a kid from a public high school in Eugene, Oregon actually have a chance? There was probably some child prodigy out there who had mastered calculus at age 5, been an Olympian by 9, and discovered a cure for cancer before hitting puberty.

Despite my doubts, I decided to enter the contest. I diligently filled out the forms, rounded up several letters of recommendation, and crafted some essays. And to my amazement, I actually won! And I won BIG -- to the tune of $17,500. Then I made another fantastic discovery: Plenty of other organizations can't wait to give money away!

So I entered other scholarship contests. I won again! And again! Now don't get me wrong: it wasn't as if I had Just written a couple of essays and suddenly money began magically falling from the sky. In fact, it was a lot of hard work, and I lost my share of scholarship competitions, too.

But through a process of trial and error, I formulated winning strategies, developed foolproof procedures, and concocted "guerrilla tactics." When the dust finally settled, I had amassed nearly $90,000 and had paid for virtually the entire cost of my Harvard education.

Biting Back

So is entering scholarship contests worth the effort? Most definitely! I'm living proof of it. Can you win these contests? You bet! All it takes is a little knowledge and a bit of elbow grease. What's the best way to get started? Read this book!

A few years ago, when I faced the daunting task of trying to pay for my college education, there wasn't anyone out there to show me the ropes. But when I discovered that thousands of organizations give away hundreds of millions of dollars in scholarship prizes, I saw rays of financial hope beckoning meto take up the quest anyway.

Now I can't guarantee that you'll pay for all of your college expenses by winning scholarship contests (for to do so also takes a bit of good luck), but with my guidance plus your hard work and determination I know that we can make a significant dent 1 your financial burden.

Reality may indeed bite, but winning college scholarships can help enterprising students bite back.

I may not have a Ph.D. in Scholarship Science hanging on my wall, but through the process of accumulating my own pot of gold, I have become somewhat of an expertat winning the college scholarship game. And, as you read a few pages ago, winning money for higher education is indeed a game. To succeed you must learn the rules and understand the players. You must internalize the principles, strategies, and guerrilla tactics that lead to victory. It then becomes a matter of preparing, practicing, and perfecting: enhancing your record in key areas, strengthening your self-promotional skills, and refining your application materials. The book you are now holding teaches you how to master this important game.

There is, however, a very odd thing about this particular game: As important as the game is, the referee never even bothers to explain the rules. Sure, scholarship administrators publish formal Judging criteria, but this only scratches the surface of what it really takes to win. There's another entire set of "hidden rules" that govern the outcomes of these contests. So how do you succeed in a game when you're not even sure how to play?

Like any other game, you could try to teach yourself through experimentation. But why "reinvent the wheel" when you don't have to? You can save yourself plenty of time, energy, and grief by learning from the high scorers -- the students who have played the game well. Of course, tracking down enough of these students on your own and convincing them to let you "pick their brains" would be a daunting task in its own right. So I've made it much easier by doing all of the work for you.

As a result, this book not only distills the core secrets learned from my own scholarship quest, but also adds to the mix many valuable insights from dozens of other scholarship winners I've interviewed. (As simple as it sounds, surveying top winners is a task that has never been done before by an author in the field.) By following the advice contained in these pages, you can avoid many of the mistakes these scholarship winners (including myself) have made, and can learn from our greatest successes. Winning scholarships may be a game, but it's a game that can be learned -- and learned quickly, too.



The foregoing is excerpted from How to Go to College Almost for Free, Updated by Ben Kaplan. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022

Don't need top grades to win big money'

Uncertain about how you're going to pay for college? Afraid of drowning in a sea of debt? Well fear not -- Benjamin Kaplan once felt that way too. But that was before he discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in scholarship prizes are waiting to be won. After successfully staking his own scholarship claim, he's come storming back with a no-holds-barred guide showing how you can do it too. In How to Go to College Almost For Free, Kaplan builds upon his own experiences and adds insights from interviews with other scholarship winners -- revealing insider secrets that put scholarship money within the reach of all students, regardless of their GPAs. The result is an "indispensable resource for high school and college students, as well as for families caught in the middle-income financial aid crunch."