by Lauren Holzmann | arts and entertainment editor

These days it is becoming increasingly more difficult for students to afford the cost of attending college without some sort of financial aid. However, in order to make each student loan payment a little less devastating for your bank account, scholarships and grants (money you do not have to pay back) are the best resource to help pay for higher education.

Scholarships.com

This among many others, is a very good resource to find scholarships. When registering for an account, you enter your general information along with the schools you are planning on attending and your intended major. You also need to enter information such as what you are involved in around and outside of school and testing scores.

Fastweb.com

Fastweb offers the same type of thing as Scholarships.com. However, on Fastweb, you can also look up at colleges and are offered resources such as career planning. When signing up for the account, you will be asked the basic general information as well as personal information like your testing scores as well.

Cappex.com

Cappex is another website where you can research colleges as well as looking through a plethora of various scholarships. There is also a resource on their website to plan your college visits and researching what is involved with different majors. When filtering through all of the scholarship matches you have, they provide you with the length of the application as well as the average amount of competition for each of the scholarships.

San Antonio Area Foundation

This is a local scholarship foundation for students in and around the San Antonio. They have various scholarships posted. There are some scholarships that are due February 12th and then all of the rest have various due dates. When you visit their website and sign up for an account, you can sort through the various different scholarships they have to offer. Some are specific to certain schools with scholarship funds in the San Antonio and surrounding areas and others are field specific.

Petersons.com

Peterson’s is one of the scholarship websites recommended on the counseling page. When I looked around on the website I was asked four basic questions such as, what kind of school I am planning to attend, if I am still in high school, if I am studying full or part-time, and if i am going to be an undergraduate or graduate student. Then you will be asked to fill out a student profile. After you finish, you can be matched with hundreds of scholarships that match your information. I haven’t used this website as much as the other four as of lately but they have very good resources for a variety of scholarships at a variety of amounts.

There are many other resources to get scholarships from and several other ways to make money to pay for college. If students need more information on other ways to pay for college, they can visit the scholarship page on the Johnson counseling website. Though some scholarships may be very small, if you keep applying for as many as you can, those little amounts can add up fast.