Young CEO reveals 'secret' to winning 36 scholarships

For many people, expensive tuition can be a barrier to college, but with Ben Kaplan, everyone can find a way to afford it.

Ben Kaplan

Ben Kaplan is the CEO of PR firm Hacker and author of the book "How to Get College Nearly Free." He just shared his "secret" to getting a scholarship to Harvard University.

Kaplan said as a teenager at South Eugene High School in Oregon, he thought the best way to pay for college was to play sports.

"I've been playing tennis since I was 9. I wanted to be a professional player and play Wimbledon one day. I thought it was the best way to earn money for tuition," Kaplan told CNBC.

However, he suffered a fractured shoulder and had to change his method of finding scholarships.

“I needed another way. I looked around and one day I was walking past the guidance office and saw a scholarship sponsored by Discover Card,” he said.

Ben Kaplan is playing tennis.

Kaplan never thought he would win this highly competitive college scholarship, but he wrote a few short essays, asked for some letters of recommendation, and sent them in.

“It was like entering a lottery. I didn’t really expect to get anything,” Kaplan said.

Surprisingly, he won $17,500.

Kaplan became addicted to applying for scholarships. During his high school years, he applied for 36 college scholarships and won 24.

In his senior year of high school, he was accepted to Harvard University. Before entering this school, he had earned enough money to attend here completely free.

“I won 24 scholarships and combined them for a total of $90,000, which at the time, combined with a year of AP (a program that helps students shorten their time at university), was enough to cover my entire cost of attending Harvard,” he explained.

Ben Kaplan in high school.

Kaplan has three tips for students looking to finance their college education:

1. Be creative in your search

To find the 36 scholarships for which he qualified, Kaplan had to look in some "unique" places.

First, he looked at the resources available at his school and then visited the guidance offices of nearby schools. In parallel, he scoured the internet to see what some of the most prestigious high schools in the country were offering their students.

"I went to some websites of some of the famous schools I knew, like Stuyvesant in New York, to see what information they were posting, even though I was a kid in Oregon.

“What I found was that all the high schools had different information for their students. A lot of it was just on their websites and anyone could go to it,” Kaplan said.

This creative technique paid off for Kaplan. Of the 24 scholarships he received, “probably seven to 10 of them were actually found by going to other schools. So that move made a difference of thousands of dollars for me,” he says.

Ben Kaplan won a $10,000 scholarship.

2. Be open to the unusual

One thing Kaplan learned from his college journey is that there are thousands of weird and unusual scholarships out there that people have never heard of.

"There was a scholarship from the Klingon language institute that required you to be a Star Trek fan. There was one I won by writing an essay about George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River, the first president of the United States.

There were scholarships where you had to do an art or science project. There were scholarships where you had to make a prom outfit out of... duct tape," he recalls.

The secret to winning a scholarship is not being the smartest or most accomplished student in the area, but being open to different possibilities and giving it your best shot, the young CEO explains.

“The common thread among all scholarship winners is not how smart they are, or where they come from, or what their grades are, but that they actually apply for those awards. Most people who win significant scholarship money have applied for multiple places,” says Kaplan.

Ben Kaplan at his Harvard graduation ceremony.

3. Fine-tune your scholarship application process

According to Kaplan, one of the most important aspects of applying to college or applying for scholarships is to continually improve the process.

For many scholarships, you can simply update your previous essays and reuse them. “Once you’ve applied for one or two scholarships, you’re more than halfway to applying for 10,” he says.

According to him, by constantly refining your work, you can not only improve your chances of winning a scholarship, but also increase your chances of getting into your dream school.

Since he had applied for scholarships during his freshman year of high school, he only needed to prepare to complete his college applications the following year.

“Basically, my Harvard application was version 10 of my application, not version one. I figured out how to tell my story,” he said.

According to TTO