Remember that wonderful equalizer, the Internet? Well, it doesn’t just open doors for American students; it opens doors for students across the globe. There are over 100 million college students worldwide, and many of them can’t get their hands on a Peterson’s Guide to Scholarships. But every single one of them has Internet access, and scholarship competition is tough. Don’t get me wrong, it’s undeniably great that today’s college student has access to more college money than his/her parents had, but every other student in the world has access to that money, too.
Let’s take this international angle one step further before I let you dive into this site, because it’s probably the greatest threat facing the American student. There’s an uncomfortable truth about ourselves that we have to face if we’re ever going to overcome it, and it’s that American students, as a whole, don’t seem to be as motivated to excel academically as those in other countries. We’ve been freefalling in the international education rankings for over 20 years. In some categories, namely the critical math and science disciplines, our students rank near dead last among the industrialized nations.
Until now, we’ve been able to brush aside those alarming numbers, remaining calm in the assumption that while students from China and India and Singapore and South Korea may be getting smarter than American students, our American students won’t be affected because they’ll likely never cross paths. Chinese students will stay in Chinese schools, Indian students will take only Indian jobs, and Korean students will stick to Korean scholarships.
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Uh-oh. We now know all of that to be false. American colleges are packed with foreign students, American jobs are routinely outsourced to India, and now, American-funded scholarships regularly go to foreign students, whose achievements and dedication routinely run circles around their American counterparts.
There’s a heck of a lot more scholarship competition now than ever before, and it’s difficult to stand out with anything other than an incredible application. And the first step to an incredible application is to eliminate mistakes! And there is no better guide in the world to eliminating those mistakes than the site you’re reading right now.
I agree with you regarding
American students. Generally most kids are trying to take the easy way out. I want to be a special needs teacher. I want to do this because I like children and have been working with special needs children for a long time. I don’t think that I am taking the easy way out. My brother is an engineering major and my sister is a nursing major. The past year (during my senior year) my mother had two forms of cancer and needed a stem cell transplant. Despite this, all three of us did well in school and competed in high school and college athletics. We also participated in various community services and worked. It is possible for the American student to be just as productive as the foreign student. You just need great motivation and my mother is a great motivator.