July 28, 2008: Need Help Paying for School?

I’ve mentioned before that I am a full-time college student. This year that may change. In order to cover the cost of my college education, I need to get a cocktail of financial assistance including federal financial aid, personal student loans, and anything else that I can get my hands on. I have been lucky in the past and have been able to cover the cost of full time tuition.

This year, though, some things changed and I was facing the prospect of having to drop out of college completely. This would have been a devastating thing for me. First of all, I love school and it is very important to me both personally and professionally to complete my degree. Second, as all of you who have ever dealt with student loans are aware, if you chose to defer payments until after graduation if you drop out, you start paying on those loans. I definitely do not have the money for that. Personal student loans were out of the question due to my own bad credit and my co-signer being temporarily out of commission. So I started researching online some other ways to get money for college.

When traditional college financing methods aren’t working for you CollegeDegreeFund.com may have a solution – micro-sponsorships. Post your profile and accept sponsorships from individuals and companies across the world starting at as little as one dollar at a time. For those who are well-versed in the art of social media, you have opportunities to promote yourself in order to garner more scholarships. Funds are released directly to the student only after enrollment is verified. On the flip side, companies and individuals can log on and sift through the profiles in order to offer scholarships to others. Small volume donors can offer scholarships as low as $5 per individual and larger volume donors can go as low as $1.

The concept and the site are really cool! For the sake of current and future student’s everywhere, I hope that this concept catches on everywhere. To check it out yourself log on to http://www.collegedegreefund.com.

Another option that I found out about is peer lending. Each network is set up differently but the basic concept is the same. Rather than asking a bank to loan you one large sum of money to pay for college, peer networks spread the loan and the risk out over many different lenders. This benefits the lenders by lowering their individual risk per person and benefits the borrower by allowing them to qualify for loans with lower credit scores that the larger lenders won’t accept. For example, Prosper.com only requires borrowers to have a score of 520 compared to a more traditional minimum requirement of 650 from other banks. If you want to learn more about peer lending, try these sites: