With the price of college education soaring off the charts, students and parents continue to ask that loaded question: How are we actually supposed to pay for this?

This question is particularly pressing for those pursuing an education at one of the nation’s top private institutions, such as Harvard, which charged its undergraduates a $39,880 tuition this year.

But Ben R. Kaplan ’99 says he has the answer: merit scholarships. And his own ability to win about $90 thousand dollars to pay his way through Harvard has perked the ears of thousands of tuition-payers looking for a financial leg-up.

Kaplan’s publishing and marketing company, Waggle Dancer Media, Inc., aims to help students win the billions of scholarship dollars that are available, but may be hidden or elusive.

“Winning scholarships is a game,” Kaplan, who is also a Crimson editor, says. “A game with high stakes and huge rewards, but to succeed, you must be ready.”

From Emails to Enterprise

Kaplan, who attended public school in his hometown of Eugene, Oregon, ays he had always assumed he would get a tennis scholarship. But after a stress fracture in his back ended his hopes for athletic recruiting, Kaplan was forced to find another way to pay for college.

Kaplan threw himself into researching and applying for various scholarships, ultimately earning enough money to pay for his college education, which he completed in three academic years.

The national media pounced on Kaplan’s success, asking him to reveal the secrets of his scholarship mastery.

After writing articles on his success for both The New York Times and U.S. News and World Report in 1998, Kaplan says he received hundreds of e-mailed scholarship questions from readers. He says that at that point he realized how much of a need there was for this sort of information, and his saved copies of this e-mail advice became the base for his first book, “How to Go to College Almost for Free,” which he completed the summer after his graduation from Harvard.

Even though none of the two dozen scholarships he won were Harvard-based, Kaplan, an Economics concentrator, got the name for his scholarship advising company from a biology course he took at Harvard.

“Waggle dancer,” Kaplan explains, refers to the honeybee that helps other bees navigate a path to newfound food sources. Kaplan says he is the scholarship-seeker version of the waggle dancer, consolidating information into an easily-digestible resource.

Kaplan promoted his self-published book through conducting free scholarship seminars at local bookstores in Oregon. He started traveling greater distances—to Seattle and San Francisco—and then went on a seven-week, 25-city national speaking tour.

Kaplan has now written 12 books, including “The Scholarship Scouting Report,” a brand new edition of “How to Go to College Almost for Free,” and his multi-volume “Scholarships That Totally Rock” series.

Although Kaplan has joined forces with New York publishing house HarperCollins to release his top book titles, Waggle Dancer Media is a production, publishing, and marketing company in its own right—focused on selling his other products and producing his live events. Kaplan says that he has 60 to 80 speaking engagements per year, speaking to more than 30,000 people annually. With fewer than 10 staff members, Kaplan’s company is a busy one. The company’s website, ScholarshipCoach.com, provides more information on his books, the business and on Kaplan himself.