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While many stories right now are focusing on financial aid programs finding themselves strapped for cash to award an increased of needy applicants, this is not universally the case. Data published by The Chronicle of Higher Education shows that two federal grant programs that were added in 2006 still have more awards than applicants.  The Academic Competitiveness Grant (ACG) and Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant have gained some participation, but still they're still falling short of enrollment goals.

Both grants are intended to supplement Federal Pell Grants for students who are both academically talented and financially needy. The ACG is a grant of $750 to $1,300 for college freshmen and sophomores who have completed a rigorous high school curriculum and excelled academically, while the SMART Grant is an award of up to $4,000 per year designed to support college juniors and seniors who are enrolled in a science, math, engineering, technology, or critically needed language program.  Approximately 465,000 students received the ACG and SMART grants in the 2007-2008 academic year, up 95,000 from the first year they were offered.

In order to attract more applicants and meet their goal of doubling participation by the 2011-2012 academic year, the department is pushing financial aid administrators to become more aware of award criteria and to make sure the grants are being fully awarded.  In addition, requirements have also been loosened and students enrolled in eligible five-year programs will be able to receive a SMART grant in their fifth year of school beginning in July.

Majoring in engineering can lead to a stable, lucrative, and challenging career, but it involves a lot of hard work and often more than four years of college with little free time to earn money to finance your education. Luckily, in addition to a good job, your engineering major can also land you college scholarships, such as this week's Scholarship of the Week. The Scholarships.com College Engineering Scholarship offers an annual award of $1,000 to an undergraduate student majoring in engineering. There are no GPA or test score requirements. To win, all you have to do is write a scholarship essay explaining what has influenced you to pursue a career in engineering.

Prize: $1000

Eligibility: Registered Scholarships.com users and current undergraduate students or high school seniors who will be enrolled in a two-year or four-year college or university in the coming academic year.

Deadline: September 30, 2009

Required Material: A completed online scholarship application and an essay of 250 to 350 words in response to the question, "What has influenced you to pursue a career in engineering?"

Further details about the application process can be found by conducting a free college scholarship search on Scholarships.com. Once the search is completed, students eligible for this scholarship award will find it in their search results.

Yesterday, the big "oh, look, a distraction from my homework!" news was a boy in Colorado who had apparently climbed into a homemade hot air balloon and floated away. This, of course, raised questions. The immediate question was, "is this for real?" especially after he was found hiding in his house, safely on solid ground, a few hours later. Immediately on the heels of this first query was a second, "who builds a giant balloon in their backyard, anyway?"

While no one has had much luck answering the first one yet, maybe you're the type of student who knows the answer to the second question. For some people, there's a certain allure to creating and executing plans for original creations. While your experiments and blueprints may not have resulted in a shiny balloon capable of capturing and holding national attention for hours, your inventions can still gain you recognition, and even cash, by way of scholarship awards. So if the saga of "balloon boy" yesterday inspired you to build your own airborne contraption, you may want to see if you can win some scholarship money by doing so.

There are numerous scholarships available for more inventive students, whether they're interested in engineering, design, business and entrepreneurship, or just making cool things as a hobby. Students engaging in other out-of-the-ordinary pursuits in addition to inventing may take an interest in any number of unusual college scholarships, ranging from awards for speaking fluent Klingon to awards for exceptional duck-calling.

Aspiring inventors who are looking for college aid will definitely want to check out the Collegiate Inventors Competition. This annual scholarship offers awards of up to $25,000 for doing what you do anyway: creating and developing a new and workable idea, process, or technology. Students more interested in building elaborate designs from shiny material, on the other hand, may find themselves drawn to the Duck Brand Duct Tape "Stuckat Prom" Contest. This well-known annual scholarship gives one lucky couple $3,000 college scholarships for designing and wearing duct tape prom attire. If you don't just want to build, but want to also produce, market, and distribute your brilliant inventions, you may be a candidate for one of several entrepreneurship and business scholarships awarded each year by various foundations. There may even be local scholarships for young entrepreneurs in your area.

These aren't the only scholarship opportunities available to creative and enterprising students.  To see more award opportunities like the ones mentioned above, conduct a free scholarship search on Scholarships.com.

Not everyone can or wants to become a chemical engineer or mathematician, but the White House wants to make sure the country's doing all it can to give students the opportunity to explore all of their options before they're ready to make decisions about their future career paths.

President Obama announced a new campaign Monday called "Educate to Innovate" that aims to encourage more middle and high school students to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math. (His remarks can be read here, courtesy of the Washington Post.) The program will call on outside organizations to spend their own money and time to educate students on the kinds of things they could do in those fields, and improve their skill sets in those areas. It's no secret that the United States has lagged behind other countries in math- and science-based fields, despite the kinds of resources already available in those fields. (Another government initiative, the Race to the Top Fund, was announced last July to in part provide more money to states for innovative science programs.)

If you're good at math or science and are still undecided about what you'd like to be when you grow up, consider this: the vast majority of highest-paying college majors involve some degree of math or science skill. Those fields of study tend to be more specialized - not everyone can be a computer engineer, for example, and often require some study beyond that undergraduate degree. But in addition to the generous salaries, advances in many of those fields make it an exciting time to pursue a career as a researcher or scientist.

There's also plenty of scholarship money to go around if you're planning on or already pursuing a math or science field. The National Science and Mathematics Access to Retail Talent (SMART) Grant is awarded to undergraduates in their third or fourth year. Eligible recipients must already be Pell recipients, and the maximum award is $4,000. If you're interested in competitions, the Intel Science Talent Search targets high school seniors with original research. Scholarships.com also awards Area of Study College Scholarships to students interested in computer science, engineering, technology, and general science. To see whether you qualify for any of these or thousands of other scholarships, many of them related to the maths or sciences, conduct a free scholarship search to see the kind of awards you're eligible for.

President Obama announced a renewed focus on "Educate to Innovate" yesterday, this time targeting the need for more math and science teachers. As part of the most recent developments involving that initiative, leaders representing more than 120 public universities pledged to do their part to increase the total number of math and science teachers from 7,500 to 10,000 by 2015. Of those who pledged that promise to the White House, 41 said they would double the number of teachers they trained in that same period.

"Educate to Innovate" was first announced last November. The program was first announced with the aims to encourage more middle and high school students to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. The program called on outside organizations to spend their own money and time to educate students on the kinds of things they could do in those fields, and improve their skill sets in those areas. This time around, the focus was on the colleges. The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities has admitted it could do more to not only get more students interested in the maths and sciences, but to better prepare those who do pursue those fields to make the United States more competitive on the international scene in those disciplines.

The White House also announced that the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowships in Math and Science program would be expanded to include Michigan and Ohio, the National Math + Science Initiative's UTeach program would be expanded to include 20 additional universities, and that NASA, in partnership with companies, non-profits, and states, will launch a pilot program to enhance learning opportunities in STEM fields for students during the summer.

If you're already interested in science and math, make sure you know about all of the scholarship opportunities that could be available to you. As more emphasis is placed those fields of study, the incentives to pursue those disciplines will grow, so the time is now to apply for funding to pursue a degree in a STEM field. The National Science and Mathematics Access to Retail Talent (SMART) Grant is awarded to undergraduates in their third or fourth year. Eligible recipients must already be Pell recipients, and the maximum award is $4,000. If you’re interested in competitions, the Intel Science Talent Search targets high school seniors with original research. To see whether you qualify for any of these or thousands of other scholarships, many of them related to the maths or sciences, conduct a free scholarship search to see the kind of awards you’re eligible for.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) released its latest list of the highest-paying college majors of the class of 2010 last week, with engineering- and technology-related fields of study once again coming out on top.

This probably won''t come as much of a surprise to you. Engineering and technology majors consistently rank high on any list of highest-paying careers, and there have only been minor changes in the ranks over the last few years. (Information sciences and systems is a new addition to the list this year, coming in at 10th place.) The only non-engineering related degrees in the top 10 this time around were computer science and information sciences and systems. According to NACE, petroleum engineering earned the highest starting salary reported at the bachelor’s degree level ($86,220). That average starting salary was more than one-and-one-half times the average starting salary reported for bachelor’s degree graduates as a whole ($48,351). The average starting salary for all graduates has fallen about 2 percent since 2009, by the way.

It's certainly not always the case, but often, the more technical your skills are, the more potential you have of landing an impressive starting salary. There''s less competition in a field like petroleum engineering, for example, as it isn't the most popular of majors, so those engineers benefit from those odds with higher salaries. (Petroleum engineering degrees account for less than 1 percent of all bachelor’s degrees conferred, according to NACE.)

What does this mean for you liberal arts majors? Even you business majors may worry that you''ll have a tough time making ends meet, as business isn't exactly overrepresented on the NACE list. Still, not everyone is going to grow up to become an engineer. (And if they did, the list would surely shift, as it depends greatly on the supply and demand of new graduates.) Certainly, the kind of field you're interested in should play a big part when you're deciding on a college major. And most college students do still consider interest over salary potential when choosing their majors, as the most popular fields of study fall well outside petroleum engineering. (According to the U.S. Department of Education, the most popular college majors are in business, the social and health sciences, and education.)

Take the NACE list with a grain of salt, and don't change your focus to aeronautics just because of the pay potential. If you have no interest in one of those high-paying majors, chances are you'll have a tough time getting through a four-year program in that discipline, and if you do graduate, an even tougher time liking a job in a career you chose for the money. But if you are passionate about engineering and technology, that's great. You'll have a good starting salary to go along with a job you enjoy.

Most 14-years-olds spend their school days learning algebra and being awkward. Not Colin Carlson: He’s too busy earning hefty scholarships for graduate school.

Carlson is a higher education veteran despite his limited years. Since the age of nine, Carlson has been taking classes at the University of Connecticut and today, he is a junior in the honors program and is working toward a dual degree in evolutionary biology and in environmental studies and ecology. The scholarship – $30,000 from the Truman Scholars program – is only the fourth of its kind bestowed upon a UConn student and these funds, plus another recently awarded $7,500 from the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship program for students headed into mathematics, science or engineering careers, will surely help the real genius as he pursues a law degree, a doctorate and a career in environmental advocacy.

Some may say $30,000 isn’t that much money for college these days but to others, it’s a life-changing sum. How are you planning to pay for school?

The academic year is winding down at many colleges and so are many students’ meal plans and bank account balances. Instead of reaching for the ramen noodles (AGAIN), grab your computer instead. That’s what Greg Woloschyn did last year and it paid off: He created Food-bot and didn’t pay for food for five months.

The then-senior and computer science major at Carnegie Mellon grew tired of scouring his campus for free dining options so he created an email account that screened messages from every mailing list on campus for food-related terms. Once that method proved successful, Woloschyn spent his winter break writing a more advanced computer program called Food-bot which used the information to populate a food calendar online. His findings weren’t just doughnuts or pizza either: Woloschyn trained the program to rate the food mentioned in event listings (for example, steak earned a 10) and assigned “awkwardness” ratings for no-cost noshies at ethnic or religious-affiliated events.

One year later, Woloschyn’s plate is pretty full: He’s expanded Food-bot beyond Carnegie Mellon to serve empty-pocketed students at Berkeley, the University of Maryland at College Park, Duke, Case Western and MIT and has plans to develop mobile applications for Android phones and iPhones this summer when he’s not at work as a software engineer for Qualcomm. If you’ve tried Food-bot, has it kept your belly and wallet satisfied?

Recent college graduates have entered one of the toughest job markets in decades. Full-time positions are scarce and with the unemployment rate hovering at 9 percent, some people have harsh words for those pursuing liberal arts degrees. For instance, Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s message to anthropology majors: The state doesn’t need more anthropologists. Perhaps he forgot his own daughter has a degree in the field. Oops!

In an interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Mr. Scott said, "Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so." He told the paper that he wants to shift more funding to science, technology, engineering and math departments – aka the “STEM” disciplines – and away from departments like psychology and anthropology. This comment didn’t sit well with the American Anthropological Association, prompting 11,000 of its members to fire back at Scott in a letter stating the governor is “unaware that anthropologists are leaders in our nation’s top science fields, making groundbreaking discoveries in areas as varied as public health, human genetics, legal history, bilingualisms, the African American heritage and infant learning.” A spokesman for the governor later said that he didn’t mean to criticize anthropologists but rather intended to highlight the demand for graduates with degrees in STEM fields.

Do you think Gov. Scott’s words were a bit too harsh? Should students pursue degrees in STEM fields because there is a demand? Recent liberal art graduates, would you go back to school and change your degree path?