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.

Scholarships That Merit It

Kaplan says that many shy away from applying for merit scholarships because they view the applications as time-consuming, with a low chance of providing ultimate benefits.

Although the odds of winning may seem low at first, Kaplan says that if students are thoughtful and strategic about their applications, their chances of winning significantly increase.

Kaplan recently had the chance to serve as a scholarship judge and saw that few of the many thousands of applicants had thought strategically about the scholarship and its judging criteria in a meaningful way.

His newest guide, “How to Go to College Almost for Free: 10 Days to Scholarship Success,” is a culmination of everything he has worked on for the past five years-—cutting down the process of applying to ten full days.

“I wanted to make the process as streamlined and efficient as possible,” Kaplan says.

Kaplan’s plans of action also apply to students already enrolled in college, who need to apply for grants while still at school.

Kaplan says his books skip over the more obscure scholarships that he used to encounter while on his scholarship search. “It almost seemed like you had to be a 4’6” tall, left-handed, double-jointed man from rural Montana to qualify for one of the profiled awards,” Kaplan says, laughing. “I knew there had to be better, more suitable scholarships out there for me.”

In addition, Kaplan says that taking the time to apply for these merit scholarships is worthwhile, because “avoiding excessive student loans gives you tremendous financial freedom.”

While the College has a strong financial aid program—with the 2003-04 year processing almost $113 million dollars in financial aid—many families are still not able to fully make ends meet.

While Kaplan says that he is not against student loans, he recognizes that excessive loan debt can be a burden.

“Students sometimes have to pass up great opportunities after college—like travel opportunities, community-service or non-profit possibilities, or work that they are really passionate about but doesn’t pay as well—because they have large student loan burdens to pay back,” Kaplan says. “Replacing loans with scholarships gives you the freedom to do what you really want to do.”

At Harvard, the median graduating debt for the Class of 2004 was $8000, according to Director of Financial Aid Sally C. Donahue.

An exit survey last year showed that students graduate with an average credit card debt of about $1200, though the Office of Financial Aid estimates that the figure is actually higher, according to Donahue.

“These merit scholarships are a great way to fill in the gaps,” Kaplan says, noting that merit scholarships apply not only to academic excellence, but also to achievement in art, music and other extracurriculars.

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