As the name implies, grants are essentially a right or a gift that is bestowed upon someone by someone else. For example, if you lived in fifteenth-century Europe, a member of the royal family might grant you the right to rule over a portion of their kingdom. When it comes to education in the twenty-first century, the government awards you money for college instead of a castle and a few hundred miles of country-side. Further, these modern educational grants, which typically range from $1,000 to $6,000, are not made to the wealthy, talented, or favorites of the ruling class. They’re designed for the rest of us peasants.

Because grants are awarded strictly based on a student’s demonstrated financial need—typically using the expected family contribution (EFC) as a measure (see Chapter 8)—there is no need to impress anyone, write a great essay, or ensure that your grades are at the top of your class. But, it is critical that anyone wanting grants not miss their federal or state financial aid deadlines. Due to the sheer number of people applying for these, the government just does not care about your sob stories of why your application is late.

Although grant programs have come to be a staple of many lower- and middle-income Americans’ college funding plans, they should not be taken as a given or accepted without some thought. First, these programs, much more so than student loans, are subject to funding cuts that occur regularly at the state level and could definitely occur at the federal level. Just because someone received a grant his freshman year of college, does not mean that the programs themselves will even exist the following year.

Second, due to the large scale of these programs with hundreds of thousands of grants being handed out annually, as well as the “free money” nature of grants, there’s very strong antifraud rules surrounding grants and students who drop out of school. And although I’m sure none of the readers of this book are considering committing fraud, students who start a program funded by grants but do not finish it are often expected to repay some or all of the money within a matter of months.