Student said ACT scores kept her from scholarships: “Either way I was screwed.”
Erika Barth, a sophomore from Reynoldsburg, Ohio studying strategic communication at OU, graduated from high school with a 4.0 GPA. She was a part of the National Honor Society and has worked every summer since she was 16. Since coming to OU, she’s been on the dean’s list each semester.
However, despite her academic achievements, Barth will be about $60,000 in debt by the time she graduates.
“I am paying for it all myself, and it has to be in student loans,” she said.
Barth said she expected to get scholarships to help finance her schooling, but only received a few small community scholarships from her hometown and a $500 per semester Gateway Scholarship from the university.
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She said she blames low ACT and SAT scores for her lack of scholarships, even though she took each multiple times.
“My main focus in school was to get these scholarships, everything I did was working for that,” she said. “I found out it didn’t really matter what you did … all that mattered was your ACT, your SAT score, and whether or not you were a minority. Either way, I was screwed.”
Barth’s parents aren’t helping to pay for her education, but her dad gives her $25 each month.
Additionally, her parents left her with the responsibility of taking out her student loans.
“They never believed in paying for us,” she said. “My parents didn’t save any for us either, we were always just expected to work on our own. They just always incentivized us to work for everything we got.”
She said it’s hard to say how long it will take her to pay off her loans.
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“That I don’t know and I’m very scared of,” she said. “I’m hoping to get a job that will allow me to pay it all off, but you never know really these days.”
She suspects it won’t be easy.
“My first plan would be just to start paying the interest,” she said. “Right now I’m a little bit scared about that because I’ve racked up quite a bit already.”
It’s not that she hasn’t been proactive about saving money.
During high school, she took up jobs at Aeropostale and DSW to raise money for college, but she said she had to quit in order to focus on ACT preparation.
For two summers, she worked at her local pool in Reynoldsburg.
Over winter break 2014, she worked a warehouse job for Limited Brands Inc., and during the winter of 2013 she had a job with UPS, working 14 hours 5 days a week.
She said at each job she made little more than minimum wage.
Barth said she is motivated by her aunt, Cindy McLaughlin, who is a project manager for Charles Schwabb in California.
“When she would come back from California to Ohio, she would always bring us back things from places she’s been. Everything that she does is successful, and I really just want to be that same way.”
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She said eventually she wants to do PR for an airline company so that she can travel the world like her aunt.
“I feel like you make your own success, and I want to keep doing that,” she said. “Even if it means having a bunch of debt, that’s not going to deter me from everything I’m doing now.”
@wtperkins
wp198712@ohio.edu
