If your child is planning on going to a private college, you’re getting ready to face one of the biggest financial burdens of your life and need all the help you can get when it comes to saving and investing. SAGE Scholars Tuition Rewards [1] aims to help you get a bit of a boost in that regard.
Tuition Rewards Review
The SAGE Scholars Tuition Rewards program let’s you earn free points that can be redeemed as scholarships at over 280 participating private colleges and universities!
If you save or invest with one of their financial partners, or are employed at one of their employer partners, you can earn Tuition Rewards [1] points.
Tuition Rewards – How it Works
- How do I earn points? In most cases you earn Tuition Rewards at a rate of 5% annually based on the value of your investments with Tuition Rewards partners [2]. As your assets appreciate, so do your points.
- How much are points worth? 1 Point = $1.00 in scholarship
- How do I use my points? If a student receives 10,000 Tuition Reward Points he or she is guaranteed to receive scholarships and other discounts of at least $10,000, spread evenly over four years ($2,500 per year).
- What is the maximum? The maximum scholarship varies by college (currently it is over $40,000). Participating schools are obligated to accept 25% of the cost of tuition spread over four years.
Tuition Rewards Details
What colleges participate in Tuition Rewards? Only private colleges that award “non-need” discounts are eligible to join the Tuition Rewards college consortium. This list of participating schools [3] will help you see if your chosen school partners with Tuition Rewards.
What financial partners does Tuition Rewards work with? There are a variety [2] of credit unions, 529 plans, and banks that partner with Tuition Rewards.
How does Tuition Rewards affect my financial aid? Colleges can use the tuition reduction as part of, or separate from, any financial aid packages so you may want to check with your school specifically to make sure it doesn’t interfere with any financial planning [4] you are doing.
Tuition Rewards Overall
This seems like a great, easy way to boost your college savings, particularly if you live in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin as you’ll get a tax break on your 529 plan plus this added benefit!
One concern is that the list of colleges is relatively small and a good deal of elite, expensive ones are excluded from the program. If your child chooses a school not on Tuition Rewards’ [1] list, the program won’t help you at all. However, hopefully it will continue to grow and include more schools over the next few years. It seems like a no-brainer to sign up. Perhaps you’ll get lucky and this will be a big boon to your [5] college [6] savings [7]!
A Note From Madison: We signed up for SAGE a few years ago and have already built up quite a few points. While I’m hoping that our kids will go to public schools [8] and we won’t need the points, it will be nice to have a discount already built up in case they do happen to choose one of the private schools on the list. Hopefully they’ll also expand the list of 529 plans soon so more people will be able to take advantage of the free points.