Navigating College Costs and Scholarships: Your Guide to Financial Aid and College Affordability

This episode of FYI features Kevin Ladd, COO of Scholarships.com, discussing the cost of higher education and how students search for scholarships.

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Who is Kevin Ladd?

Kevin is the COO of Scholarships.com. He is an expert on edtech and the role it plays in student success.

In this Episode

Kevin Ladd, COO of Scholarship.com, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about the evolution of scholarships.com in its mission to demystify financial aid for students. They go through the importance of launching your scholarship search early and how scholarships.com has evolved to stay a crucial resource amid skyrocketing education expenses. 

Kevin dissects the influence of public scrutiny on the future of higher education, ponders the separation of sports from academics, and reflects on the profound impact of COVID-19 on college landscapes. Join us for a compelling exploration into creating a more accessible and economically feasible higher education system.

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Episode Transcript

Navigating College Costs and Scholarships with Kevin Ladd

Publishing Date: January 23, 2024

[00:00:00] Gil: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution Podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. And today, we’re throwing it back to a conversation that I had at the 2023 NACAC Conference in Baltimore with Kevin Ladd. Kevin Ladd is the COO of Scholarships.com. We had a long conversation about a number of topics, mostly centered around affordability and the issues that he sees for students and families in today’s higher ed market. Let’s listen in.

[00:00:39] Kevin: Hi, my name is Kevin Ladd. I’m the COO of Scholarships.com. I was actually one of the original members of the team that built the Scholarships website back in 1998, ‘99. And I’ve been here ever since pretty much. I started out as, kind of, the webmaster and ended up worked my way up to business development and chief operating officer.

So, to take you way back, just to give you a little bit of background, I actually grew up in Waterville, Maine, which my house was two and a half miles from the campus of Colby College. which is one of the more, like, elite, very expensive private liberal arts schools in Maine. And I spent 29 years of my life there before I decided I needed to broaden my horizons a little bit. While I was there, I did everything, from telemarketing to selling grit newspapers in front of Sizzler Steakhouse, to dish washing and sous chef and chef at a restaurant, to being a carpenter.

I had a pretty, pretty solid mosaic of a background before I even left for Chicago. And then, I headed out West, lived out here with a… in the same apartment with a friend for a while, and basically taught myself how to use a computer. So, this is back in 1999. I didn’t have a computer. I taught myself on his computer. I taught myself Photoshop, web development software, all that stuff. And then, we landed a job which was, a couple of jobs, one of them was for UIC (University of Illinois Chicago) and the other one was for Scholarships.com, which at the time was just a concept. It was, “We’re going to build this website and we’re going to match students to scholarships based on their profile instead of them looking through a giant book,” like I had to do when I was 17, 18 years old.

And then, fast-forward to now, we’re in our 23rd, 24th year. We just did a ground-up redesign of the website and changed all the branding and colors. And we’re at NACAC. And I’m hanging out with Gil Rogers, my old friend from Zinch/Chegg. And, yeah, the show is going great.

[00:02:17] Gil: Scholarships is, kind of, the OG matching site, right? Like, there were, there’s college matching sites or scholarships matching sites, many have come and gone over the years. It’s really important, right? It’s, you know, it’s instead of being that binder that is outdated in an admissions office or a guidance counselor’s office, rather, it’s really meant to make the process easier. So, tell me how Scholarships.com started and how it’s endured.

[00:02:44] Kevin: Scholarships.com, from the beginning, we, you know, we rented a database, like everyone else did. And it was Winch Green Orchard House or something like that, just to get us off and running so we could start something. And then, we started actually contacting providers of scholarships. They started sending in their scholarships for us, and we entered them for them.

And then, we built a interface for them, like a form online. I think, again, this is 1999. This is very early 2000. But we had a form online, and they would come and they would submit their scholarships. And so, that became the core of Scholarships.com. So, it’s a highly curated scholarship database. I don’t know what everyone else does or uses, but I know that ours is, it’s like a river. It’s constantly moving. Stuff comes in, stuff goes out, stuff changes, gets updated on a daily basis. We have actual brains and eyeballs looking at and thinking about and making sure these things are legit, that they don’t charge a fee, you know, that it’s the best possible experience for the student, obviously, that they match well and that things don’t go out of date. We try to keep things current, obviously. And we just focus on that quite a bit more than I believe a lot of others might. So, I feel like that’s what puts us above.

And again, the experience that we have, 20-plus years. I’ve been doing this a long time, so I really know this topic backwards and forwards. I’ve spoken about it on interviews and written about it and been interviewed about it. And it’s, it hasn’t changed a ton. The only thing I think that’s changed is it’s even more expensive now than it was. It was a very needed service back in 1999. And now, it’s even more needed. The prices continue to rise. You know, we have all these programs to try to help students applying for colleges. And they really need to be able to pay for it once they get accepted. You know, God willing, they get accepted, how are they going to pay for it? Some of the ticket prices are $75,000 now. It’s pretty crazy. Most people aren’t paying that, but even if you’re paying $40,000, that’s $160,000 over four years. If it takes you five years, that’s $200,000. That’s a lot of money. That’s a small house or a really nice car. And you’re going to pay interest on it.

So, we really feel that giving the opportunity, sure, you have to work and you have to find the scholarships using our tools, and then what’s important is to start early and to start when you’re in high school, like, freshman, sophomore. And give yourself that extra time, because everyone gets 24 hours in a day, but if you give yourself three years instead of one year to find scholarships, you have a much better chance of getting matched to stuff that you can actually win. And that’s what we’re, kind of, about what we’re trying to address right now.

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[00:05:50] Gil: So, a lot of conversations that we’re having here are focused around access. There’s a lot of input that we’re getting on what’s driving students to apply to college. They have to go through this process, start the application, get notified of their application status. And now, we’re seeing trends around things like direct admission and the ability to create a profile about themselves, and then the schools reach out and offer them a space. So, I’d love to hear about your thoughts on the emphasis of access. And obviously, we’ll dive into how that dovetails with affordability. Because you can have a student be admitted to your institution, but if they can’t afford it, they can’t enroll, right? So, I’d love to hear your thoughts about the access conversation and how these institutions should really be thinking about it.

[00:06:36] Kevin: You know, personally, maybe I’m just old-fashioned. It seems interesting to me that a school would just accept a student without having even read any sort of application. But it seems like things could definitely go that way and there are schools that are accepting 80% of their applicants, which is almost the same as not needing to interview them at all. But then comes the question of, “Okay, now how am I going to pay for it?”

Because even smaller schools with a 35% graduation rate for four years are able to charge, even after financial aid, $20,000-something. So, we’re talking about 100,000 for four years.

That’s where the financial aid aspect comes in. Student loans, I’m not a big fan of how they work, where an 18-year-old kid is about to go to school, it may or may not be a good fit, but they’re basing whether they can afford to do so on their parents’ income, I guess, with the presumption that the parent’s going to have the ability to pay for that college education.

One thing that I think is a interesting paradox is, if you are able to get accepted to University of Chicago or Princeton, you’re better off coming from a very poor family because you’ll go for free. But if your parents make $180,000 a year combined and you get into one of those schools and you really want to go, there’s not a lot for you. They don’t have merit aid. They only have financial aid for people that can prove, basically, being destitute. Or, I mean, there’s levels, too, obviously.

It’s hard to get into University of Chicago, but if you get in, you’re in. And that’s it. You don’t have to worry about it. They’re going to figure it out. You get a work study maybe, but they’ll pay for it. And then, there’s the other 99% of schools. And students are struggling. I’ve had so many conversations today with people who are like, “You know what? Some schools are like, ‘Okay, all my kids, they have financial need.’ They’re all, ‘The EFC is, like, zero.’” I’m like, “Great. This is a great site for you because you’re going to find stuff. You have to show financial need and it’s going to be great.” But everyone else in between, the wealthy and the people who don’t have any money, there’s a lot of people who used to be able to afford to put their kid through school for, you know, I don’t know, seven grand a year or something like that. They’re going to have to stop buying Audis and start buying Honda Accords. I think almost a direct quote from someone I spoke with earlier today, it’s really making choices.

And again, I think the other choice is, if you really want to find scholarships and apply for them and win them, give yourself as much time as possible to do so. We have, you know, there’s millions of scholarships. The number is almost abstract. It’s like stars in the sky. It doesn’t even matter how many there are out there. There’s more than you’re ever going to apply for or win. But how are you going to find the time to do it? Well, you have to set aside 10, 12, 15 hours a week when you’re a freshman, sophomore in high school, as much time as you can spare when you’re not playing lacrosse or when you’re not going to school or when you’re not doing the stuff you should be doing, like having fun with your friends. But make time, because if you don’t make time, next year you know it’s January or senior year, you don’t have any scholarships, you’re, kind of, in a tough spot because your parents can’t afford it, but they’re expected to pay it. You have to take out student loans. And then, you wake up five years from now and you have $580-a-month student loan payment that you’re going to have to make for the next 30 years.

It’s, really, that’s the important thing. I think my message is to, yeah, you should work smarter, not harder, but I think sometimes you have to work smarter and harder. So, be as smart as you can and be as efficient as you can, and manage your time really well. But you got to make time, too. And you have to roll up your sleeves at some point. You have to write essays. Use one for six different applications if you possibly can while still observing all the rules, but you have to understand and acknowledge that the financial aspect of it, like, it’s hard for a student to understand that. They understand when they start paying the bill when it’s too late. But when you’re 17, it’s abstract. Someone has to make it clear.

And I think one of the things that we probably are failing to do is having econ classes when you’re a freshman in high school or even in middle school, having even a basic understanding and having kids. You know, I had paper route when I was 13 years old. I always understood. I was probably 12, I always understood dollars. And because I earned them and I spent them and I had a budget because it was… I only made 20 bucks a week in my paper route. But I was lucky enough to be poor. You know, my parents didn’t have money for Nikes and Levi’s and all the stuff that I wanted, so I had to save my money for a summer to buy a Schwinn World Sport.

That’s how I learned. It was just an accident, but I got lucky that my parents didn’t have money. If your parents have money, they want to buy all this stuff for you and make you happy and give you everything. And they love you. And they don’t realize what they’re doing is they’re setting you up for a situation where you don’t really understand how revenue is generated and what it takes to do it because you’ve never done it. And then you’re… now you’re out here in college and you’re burning 30 grand a year. And if you don’t get those scholarships to help subsidize the, you know, whatever financially the college gives you, it’s all loans. And then, hopefully, some are federal, but if you don’t qualify for them because your FAFSA says that you make too much money, then you have private loans. And those are even worse because the interest rates are higher.

So, it’s a very choppy sea of a lot of different aspects of going to college, being able to do well in college, being happy in college, and wanting to stay on your campus, and paying for college all at the same time. It’s a lot for an 18-year-old kid who’s just getting out of high school.

[00:11:07] Gil: So, what can institutions do, colleges themselves do, to lower prices?

[00:11:13] Kevin: Which is never probably going to happen, maybe at least freeze them. At least, if I… if you say, “It’s this price when I’m a freshman, don’t raise it for my sophomore year, can they lock it in for four years?” But seriously, though, I think colleges need to get more involved in getting in high schools and creating programs and funding them for students, especially high schools and middle schools, even, where they don’t have the money to do this stuff. And financial literacy and just an understanding of the culture of college, how it’s going to change, you need to bring these kids along, especially in the lower income parts of the country. Because if a kid is great, he’s really, really brilliant and he gets a 36 ACT, and he gets into Princeton, and he gets a free ride because he checks all the boxes, but he goes there, no one there looks like him, no one there is from his… you know, he’s from a small town in Alabama somewhere. He can’t relate to anybody up there in New England. And that’s a problem. If someone was in that school and they, kind of, socialize people with other cultures and they, sort of, taught financial literacy and they, sort of, gave you that, like, “Here’s your trajectory and how you have to build to this point,” it would be so incredibly helpful for that student to go then go to Princeton and be like, “I got this.” Like, “Yeah, it’s a little intimidating. I’m only 18 years old. I just got here. But I can do this because I was prepared for it.” You know, we don’t just let people go fly a plane. You have to have, like, a lot of hours of lessons in flight, and there’s a lot of stuff you understand that you learn over years and years of doing it.

And I think it’s just, there’s enough college in the country, there’s enough money in education that a lot of that could be directed, funneled towards, invested in students way before college, because these kids will go and they’ll take out a loan and drop out after the first month and they can’t get their money back and they have to pay back the loan. They didn’t even get the education.

I met one. I met this young woman in Chicago when I was mentoring. And she’s trying to figure out how she’s going to get… it was only $13,000. It was like, you know, a small school in the city. But she’s got to pay back that with interest or default on it and be screwed. You know, it’s very broken. And I think colleges need to find a way to help fix it, because they’re the ones with the arms raised of building a bigger, better field or putting a river on the campus or an artificial whatever, because they’re trying to keep up with each other. They’re trying to, like, “Oh, we have a spa. We have better food.” Colleges used to be just academics, but now it’s like, it’s like a hotel. The kids want, and a lot of them expect to be coddled. And they want that kind of life. And I get it, like, who wouldn’t want it? But it’s just, it’s part of what’s really blown this up and made this so expensive.

And I think they take some of those funds and put it into, like, especially again, lower-income areas and help prepare those kids for college, because those Loyola Prep isn’t going to have a problem. That’s what they do. They churn out college students. But so many public schools in Mississippi and south side of Chicago and the west side of New York, like, they don’t have that. And they won’t have it unless someone helps them.

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[00:14:35] Gil: All right. So, we have a lot to unpack there, I think, but one of the things I want to make sure that we also touch on and talk about is the topic of, you know, your reflections on the changes that you’ve seen and, also, your predictions for, what are the next 20 years look like? Maybe, we’ll start with the next two years, right? Because there’s so much change that is happening.

But I want to, you know, really center the conversation around cost and how we can, maybe, innovate to be more efficient and use our data more efficiently to better support students. There’s a lot of directions that we could go, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on, how do we use data to better support access? How do we use it to provide a better education? How can data scale? How can institutions better utilize these resources that are at their disposal that they didn’t necessarily have 20 years ago but do have today?

[00:15:28] Kevin: Well, I think, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years. I don’t even know if it’ll take several years. It could be a decade or more. But there’s no question it’s turning. It has to. I don’t know how slow it is, what the arc is at this point. And it could be by 2026, 2027, there could be some remarkable changes. I don’t know.

But I think what we’re seeing is people are waking up to it. I think it used to be just us people in the know who were in this business, we understood better, sort of, what was happening. And I think, now, it’s broader knowledge. It’s not just for the insiders who work in the industry. I’ve talked to a few people in the industry talking about, like, direct admissions, that kind of thing. And that very well could happen, and that could actually level the playing field a little bit.

But yeah, I just think higher education has to change. I think, honestly, formal education in the United States, you know, K to 12, I think, has improved, I’d say, remarkably over the last four decades since I was a kid. Like, you can have, like, an agent, like the LD, ADHD, like, they have that now. They have colleges that specifically address learning disabled or learning different students.

But I think what’s… what we definitely know is, after COVID, we know that college education is more than just going and learning the next level of academics, right? It’s going to college. It’s being social. It’s making friends and, maybe, having one of your friends come over to your college, go to theirs, networking. It’s all that. It’s socializing. It’s learning other cultures because you go to school far away from where you live. It’s all that stuff. And it’s also just, like, it’s the rite of passage. It’s that next level of becoming an adult.

So, I think it benefits everyone to have college and universities, but I think we have to reorganize our priorities. Look at, like, the SEC and all the D1 schools, like, what the coaches get paid, right? I read an article about it. I was like, “I couldn’t believe.” And I get it.  Like, it’s, we don’t like to act like our universities and colleges are businesses, but they are. Everything’s a business where money is transacted. Whether it’s a not-for-profit, no matter what it is, you’re still competing with these other schools. And if you want that coach, you’re going to pay more your competitor wants to pay him. So, you can make tens of millions of dollars as a college football coach, and they’ll spend ten million dollars on a new stadium. And I get it brings in money, which they need, but should we look at separating sports entirely from… I’m not saying we should. I don’t want to get any, you know, death threats on my phone, but don’t give that out.

No, but seriously, I mean, should it be so inextricably tied together? For the people who don’t even care about sports, “So, I get tickets to go to the game. I don’t care. I really just have a $20,000 college per year bill, then a $30,000 one, and now I have sports.” I don’t know. I think it’s time to reflect and look and ask all the questions, including that question, are schools really… are they heavy? Are they light on staff? Are they as efficiently run as possible? I don’t know. I mean, every school is different. Our public schools, like University of Michigan, which is huge, run as efficiently as a small school that has to run lean because they’re a private school, and they’re small. I mean, we saw a bunch go away and some absorbed some others during COVID, which is inevitable. I saw Johnson & Wales lost half their campuses. I think they were on the bubble anyway, but they closed… they only kept open Raleigh and Providence. And they had another one in Florida and one in Colorado, I think.

So, yeah, I mean, we’ve already seen it. We’ve seen the shift. And I think COVID pushed it a little bit further towards the precipice. And yeah, maybe it’ll be the next two or three years, maybe it’ll be the next five or seven, I don’t know, but it’s going to happen. I think everyone has to, sort of, be, sort of, introspective about their organization and ask themselves, like, “How can we make it more accessible? How can we have students come here and stay?”

And because the students, these colleges want the students to stick, too, right? Like, it, it benefits you to, to bring students up. You can’t… I mean, you can’t recruit them from the time they’re seven and say, like, “We’ll teach you the culture of how to go to college only if you come here,” that’s a way early decision. It’s WAD. But what you could do is just say, “I’m just going to put my faith in the fact that, if I help people become educated on how to pursue a higher education, that some are going to come here and our graduation rates are going to go up and everyone’s going to be better for it.”

Because I grew up in Waterville, Maine, two and a half miles from Colby College. And I was a townie. And I saw BMWs. I’d never seen BMWs before. It’s not a very wealthy town. And these 18-year-old kids are driving their parents 7 series BMW. And I was like, “I want to be that kid. Like, I want that stuff.”

So, Colby College, back when they started, Waterville bailed Colby College out because we wanted to have a college in the city. This is way before my time, old as I am. And Colby has now, in the last several years, put money back into Waterville. Waterville is turning to a very not-pleasant place to be. I didn’t like it at all. They put a nice hotel in the downtown. They put a dormitory downtown with a retail first floor or something along those lines. People are actually coming into the downtown now, and they’re going to the businesses, because Colby revitalized it — the arts center, the opera house, things that are very important to Colby. They just built another arts center or arts facility on their campus. They’re building, basically, every year. And I think that’s the mentality that we need to, sort of, let’s expect our colleges to give back a little bit to the communities that they are a part of, especially the schools. I don’t know. To me, I guess it’s the same message I just gave you before. But I guess I’m pretty adamant that that’s a pretty solid answer, especially the schools that you know can afford it. Let the endowments you can’t even spend, give it to a poor, you know, impoverished community for their public schools.

[00:20:30] Gil: Well, awesome. Thank you for those amazing insights. And so, if people want to get in touch with you, how’s the best way for them to go about that?

[00:20:38] Kevin: Absolutely, KNL, it’s K as in “Kevin,” N as in “Nebuchadnezzar,” L as in “Ladd,” @scholarships.com. I’ll do it one more. That’s K as in “Kevin,” N as in “November,” L as in “Ladd,” @scholarships.com. Couldn’t help myself. I love the Nebuchadnezzar thing.[00:20:52] Gil: Thanks, again, Kevin. It’s always a pleasure. We’ll have all of that information in the episode notes. And we will see you all back here next time on FYI.

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