Nearing her final semester at Ursinus College, Jennifer Davis didn’t know if she would reach the finish line. Despite working four part-time jobs and having secured a patchwork of loans, merit scholarships, and need-based aid, as of December she was still about $1,500 short.
Taking on another job wasn’t an option for Ms. Davis, a first-generation student from Pottsville, Pa. She’d already planned to give up the best-paying one because it conflicted with her class schedule. Her outlook was bleak: Unless she could come up with the money within a matter of weeks, she wouldn’t graduate in May. But where to find $1,500?
A friend had told her months earlier about GoFundMe, a crowdfunding website that lets individuals raise money from friends, relatives, and social-media networks. “I would never do that,” Ms. Davis, 21, thought at the time. Proud and independent, she found the prospect of asking for help so publicly distasteful.
Then one night she got home from work waiting tables at a local cafe. Stiffed by a customer during a slow shift, she’d earned only $10. Despairing, she sat up late and had a reckoning. “It’s got to happen now,” she told herself. Time to ask for help.
She went to GoFundMe, opened an account, and began typing.
“I’m halfway through my senior year of college as an English major with a sociology minor, and (this is hard for me to admit, but) I need help affording my final semester,” she wrote. “I do not like admitting that my circumstances have reached such a point. But my education is too important for me to continue to allow my pride to stand between me and a better life.”
Knowing that GoFundMe would take a 5-percent cut of whatever she raised, Ms. Davis set her goal: $1,735.
As students confront rising college costs and a labyrinthine financial-aid process, some are turning to crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe to cover their expenses. While the approach is still novel and hardly widespread, financial-aid officials say, enthusiasm for online campaigns is very much a reflection of the times. Students are frustrated with the aid process, eager to avoid student-loan debt, and worried over a weak job market. They are also comfortable with social-media networks and willing to share personal information online.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that some students seek help on such platforms. The technology may be new, but the idea—think tip jars for college—is not.
Beth Kobliner, a personal-finance expert and the author of Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties, understands the impulse to be innovative. But she has reservations about the unknowns. Could collecting money one year, for instance, complicate a student’s financial aid the next?
Beyond practical considerations are questions of self-respect. “How much of it is asking people you don’t know versus people you do know?” asks Ms. Kobliner. “When do you cross the line between being resourceful and begging?”
Ms. Davis wrestled with that even after she created her GoFundMe profile. She left it alone for several days before sharing the link on Facebook. Still conflicted, she didn’t log in to GoFundMe for two more weeks.
The thought of friends and family seeing her plea and disregarding it was unbearable, she said later. Equally discomfiting was the idea that they would see it and contribute—and she would have to accept their assistance.
“I’m not used to people helping me,” she says. “I’ve always had to do everything on my own.”
Calls for Help
GoFundMe is just one player in the crowdfunding game. Several websites have popped up in recent years to let people raise money for causes, ventures, and emergencies of all stripes. Classroom supplies. New businesses. Sick pets.
On most sites, people craft profiles—some more sophisticated than others—explaining who they are, why they need money, and, in some cases, what the donor will receive in return. From there, the details vary: Kickstarter attracts people looking to finance creative projects. Pave, popular among start-ups, allows “backers” to invest directly in individuals, who then pay back the loan in monthly installments based on what they earn.
A few sites are geared specifically toward students. Zero Bound lets users pay off their student loans through “sponsored volunteerism.” Created by a Northeastern University graduate who had $200,000 in debt, the site tells overwhelmed prospective users: “You Are Not A Loan.” ScholarMatch, founded by the writer Dave Eggers, connects low-income students in California with private donors and colleges. The donors contribute to the colleges, which then award scholarships.
GoFundMe, the site Ms. Davis turned to, seems to be a particularly popular choice among college students. They post hoping to cover tuition, unforeseen gaps arising from glitches in financial aid, study abroad. Many appear to be financing college on their own, or with minimal help from parents.
Education campaigns have proliferated on GoFundMe since the site’s creation in 2010: Of its more than 350,000 campaigns, only medical pleas make up a larger grouping.
At times earnest, irreverent, and self-promotional, students’ profiles reflect their varying circumstances. “ONE MORE STUPID COLLEGE CREDIT,” reads a plea for $1,500 from an art student in Massachusetts. “Help Me Pay for This Semester,” says a first-generation student at a private college in Florida looking to raise $5,000. “Erica Goes to Film School” is the headline of a successful $22,000 campaign to help an aspiring filmmaker in Chicago enroll in a two-year, for-profit film school there.
Alyssa Brackett, a sophomore at Aurora University, in Illinois, rewrote her profile three times, she says, trying to strike the right tone. She added photos—of her roommate, for example, and resident adviser—to demonstrate to prospective donors how much college means to her.
“You just want to fix it as much as you can and make it perfect,” Ms. Brackett says of her GoFundMe profile, “so people see how determined you are and how much you need this.” She is trying to raise $3,000.
An aspiring elementary-school teacher, Ms. Brackett turned to GoFundMe after learning late last semester that a tax mix-up between her divorced parents had affected her financial aid. Since early January, her campaign page has been shared on Facebook more than 650 times, and she’s received donations from 76 people. By late January, she had exceeded her goal by $20 and was able to register for classes.
Bijan Halsey, a student at Virginia Commonwealth University, set a goal of $6,000, which he needed to continue his studies this semester toward a second bachelor’s degree, in biology (his first is in psychology). But with donations from a dozen people, the 22-year-old Brooklyn native raised only $1,330.
Every little bit helps, he says. But he still owed VCU about $5,000 for last semester. Two days before he had to come up with it, his mother surprised him: Relatives had chipped in to pay the balance. They just didn’t want to use the crowdfunding site, because of the 5-percent fee.
Familiar Concepts
Crowdfunding seems like a new way for students to pay for college. Is it?
Tales of financial adversity have long been told on scholarship applications. And in fund raising, colleges often rely on students—in print or in person—to share their stories to appeal to prospective donors.
Justin Draeger, president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, thinks crowdfunding sites may be more familiar than different. They essentially set up “a communication tool and a bucket,” he says, for students to receive money.
“It’s a good-will gesture: ‘Here’s some money to go to school,’” says Mr. Draeger. “It’s no different than if your grandma or aunts or cousins gave you money.”
Financial-aid officials don’t talk much about crowdfunding, he adds. It’s still a niche. But it aligns with one of the principles of federal financial aid, he says: that the primary responsibility of paying for college rests with students and their families. “If going out and crowdsource-funding your education is part of you fulfilling your ability to pay,” he says, “that’s a great thing.”
Crowdfunding’s novelty may be what makes it effective, says Mark Kantrowitz, a financial-aid expert and senior vice president and publisher at Edvisors. “It attracts attention because most people don’t do it.”
The inclination to be creative when something big is at stake, though, is deeply familiar—as is making a personal plea. So says Joyce Serido, an assistant research professor at the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Arizona who studies how people cope with financial stress.
Getting personal often works because it can make potential donors feel “that they’re all that stands between you and survival,” she says. “People like to feel like they make a difference.”
As for Ms. Davis, after two weeks of ignoring her new campaign page, she finally logged back in to see where things stood. Shocked, she looked at the list of donors: Most were current or former Ursinus students; some were relatives; a few were strangers. Their contributions ranged from $5 to $300. By early January, 26 people had given $1,150—several hundred dollars short of her goal, but far beyond what she’d expected.
“I did the happy cry for a little bit, that people were reaching out and saying, ‘We care about you,’” she says. “But I also hated the fact that this was all making me feel like a charity case.” Meanwhile, she quit the cafe job and doubled her hours at one that paid better.
While Ms. Davis’s GoFundMe campaign is helping her finish her bachelor’s degree, she hopes a few years of steady employment will spare her from similar financial uncertainty if she goes to graduate school. GoFundMe is an option, she says. But she’d prefer not to use it.
Justin Doubleday contributed to this article.
