Study Grants For Women Over 30

Older women face many obstacles when they want to go back to school. For one thing, studying is a difficult habit to get back into. For another, it can be very embarrassing to step into the classroom only to be surrounded by an ocean of much younger faces. And then there is the matter of funding their studies. Many older women who need to return to school are not well off, and need grants for women over 30 to pay for their tuition.

All these difficulties may not matter to you if you are in your 40-s or 50-s and your husband is paying for you to go back to school because your kids are all grown up and you are getting bored at home. But what if you had been a housewife for the past decade or two, and something out of your control has forced you into the job market? You have probably already discovered that most jobs pay peanuts unless you have a college degree. On the other hand, if you have been a working mother all this time, you may have come up against an unbreakable wall in your career. You may be seeing younger colleagues getting promotions that should rightfully be yours just because they have a better education. In this case, you definitely need to upgrade your education.

You have probably already investigated all of the better-known educational grants and scholarships. Most of them have one problem - they take aim at younger students. They are intended to help recent high school graduates get into college, and do not help an older woman who wants to go back to school. Most study grants for women over 30 are not well-publicized.

One exception is the Pell grant. Many recipients of this grant study in online colleges like the University of Phoenix. Unfortunately, it only covers about 30% to 60% of your tuition. If you are a single working mother at her mid-career trying to upgrade herself, this might well be enough to make a difference.

That means a housewife returning to the workforce and seeking higher education needs to find additional educational grants for women over 30 if they want to get their college degree. But how do you find these additional educational aid programs? These are quite highly-specialized and not many college financial aid officers are familiar with them.

You have probably already gone to FAFSA's website. But have you gone to grants.gov to look for a list of federal grants applicable to you? In theory, it collects information about all the grants administered by the US government. In practice, you should only use it as a starting point. Once you have searched their database, you should visit the websites of each government agency to look for additional financial aid programs not listed in grants.gov.

Apart from the government, there are also many private foundations who offer grants for women over 30 to go back to school. The following are just a few of the more prominent charities - the Philanthropic Educational Organization, the Jeannette Rankin Foundation, and the Talbots Charitable Foundation. And these are just the general scholarship programs that aim to help older women.

There are also specific scholarships for women studying science, maths, computing technology, even arts, music and photography. All you need to do is patiently comb through the internet search results using Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Many older women can have difficulty financing their further education. Fortunately, there are more than a few college grants for women over 30 for those who are willing to work hard.