Donahue noted that student debt levels have dropped over 50 percent in the past five years, mostly because of recent financial aid initiatives.

Any advice for Harvardians?

Kaplan’s biggest piece of advice, regardless of age or college, is to “Make It Personal.”

“I realized early on how important it was to make your application intensely personal by including all sorts of anecdotes, examples, and experiences that are unique to you,” he says. “No one has shared your exact life and doing this helps you to stand out from the crowd.”

For current Harvard students in search of financial support, Kaplan recommends conferring with individual departments to research relevant grants or scholarship opportunities. “Individual departments often have knowledge about specific award programs that other parts of the university don’t necessarily know about,” he says.

Also, Kaplan says that a big mistake many students make is completing just one or two scholarship applications and then stopping.

“There is a learning curve involved,” Kaplan says. “Plus, you can recycle and reuse a lot of material. Once you’ve done one or two applications, you’ve already done 60 percent of the work to apply for 10, if you’re smart about how you approach the process.”

Kaplan says that it took him as many as 20 hours to complete a scholarship application in the beginning, but by his fifteenth application he could sometimes crank one out in an hour.

“Results on any one scholarship can’t be guaranteed. I recommend applying for at least a dozen,” he says. “And don’t neglect the small local scholarship—the small prizes add up, and not as many people apply for them.”

“When people realize their education dreams, other dreams become possible. And this gives me incredible amounts of energy,” Kaplan says.

“I feel like this is exactly the thing I was meant to be doing at this point in my life,” Kaplan says. “I want to inform, inspire, and motivate kids and families.”

—Staff writer Nicole B. Urken can be reached at urken@fas.harvard.edu