If your clients are flooding you with calls about how they can pay their kids' college tuition–or even if they're not, but they're going crazy looking for scholarships–there are a couple of places to go for help. First is The Scholarship Book 2003 (National Scholarship Research Service, 2002, Prentice Hall Press). This weighty tome-cum-CD-ROM is a hefty reference to "4,000 scholarship sources; 400,000 awards worth over $2 billion; and awards up to $40,000 per year," according to the cover. The book also covers fellowships, grants, and loans.
Scholarships are available in all sorts of categories, in denominations ranging from "a musical instrument" (the Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation) to a few hundred dollars to many thousands of dollars. Neither are they restricted to the young (some are only offered to seniors for "continuing education"), the academically excellent (in skimming the entries, we saw some for those with a GED), or the business-minded (scholarships can be found for everything from agriculture and horticulture to the humanities, film, and medicine).
At the other end of the spectrum is New Strategies for College Funding: An Advisor's Guide, by Raymond D. Loewe with KC Dempster (John Wiley & Sons, 2002). This book, also with CD-ROM, gives advisors a complete look at how to plan for their clients' needs when it comes to college funding. The CD-ROM in this case contains software for calculating the outcomes of various scenarios involved in college planning (i.e., institutional vs. federal methodologies in determining financial aid requirements; amount needed at various rates of return to achieve goals; college cost projections; and others).
