Good question. There's a lot of outside aid to be had. Consider the well-known scholarships that pay out big. If you did really well (99th percentile) on the PSAT, you may be eligible for a National Merit Scholarship. In this, you’ve got your work cut out for you; several large public universities (University of Arizona,; University of Tulsa) will offer to subsidize nearly your entire college education. The National Merit Corporation will itself give you a relatively small amount of money ($1,000/year) for colleges that don’t offer these scholarships, and you may also be eligible for another third-party scholarship through the NMC. There are other major national scholarships as well; there’s the Coca-Cola Scholarship (which emphasizes academic achievement and community service), the Siemens Competition and the Intel Science Talent Search (for which you must design. present. and compete with an independent science project), and the Ayn Rand Essay Content (best essayist gets $10,000),; among others. You should also look at cultural/ethnic/religious organizations; these places often give scholarships to students of that culture/ethnicity/religion (the Hispanic Scholarship Fund is one of the best-known). The bigger national scholarships tend to be extremely competitive, however; they are usually far more selective than even the best schools in the country.