Ben Kaplan won more than two dozen scholarships -- amassing nearly $90,000 in unrestricted college cash for use at any school. In 1999, he graduated from Harvard debt-free, with virtually the entire cost of his education covered by his scholarship winnings.

In addition to writing The Scholarship Scouting Report, Kaplan is the author of How to Go to College Almost for Free and Scholarship Seeker’s Toolbox -- the three books forming an essential paying-for-college trilogy for students of all ages. Kaplan has also written numerous articles on winning scholarships, including columns for The New York Times and U.S. News & World Report, that have been syndicated in publications nationwide. He has been featured on hundreds of television and radio programs, including appearances on Oprah, NBC, CBS, and National Public Radio.

Known internationally as "The Scholarship Coach," Kaplan has served as the resident scholarship adviser at some of the Internet’s most popular scholarship search websites, and is the founder of ScholarshipCoach.com, the leading online scholarship advice portal.

Kaplan currently resides in Portland, Oregon, and can be contacted at Ben@ScholarshipCoach.com via e-mail.

Throughout this new edition you'll also find 28 "Ask the Coach" boxes, where I answer the most frequently asked and thought-provoking questions posed to me during my Scholarship Coach National Tour workshops and on my ScholarshipCoach.com website. (You'll be able to recognize these special sections by looking for the graphic shown left.) You'll undoubtedly find that many of these questions are the very ones you've been asking. A list of the "Ask the Coach" boxes and the pages on which they appear is given in the table of contents and in the index.

I've also taken great pains, in this new edition, to make the sections on searching for scholarships the most up-to-date and comprehensive information on the planet (or any other planet!). After logging hundreds of hours on the Web searching for scholarships, I have substantially expanded or entirely revamped sections on Internet scholarship sleuthing. I've profiled the leading scholarship databases and rated each one on key criteria so you'll know what to expect and be able to spend your time where it counts.

To avoid the one-size-fits-all approach found in most how-to books, I have included sections outlining custom-tailored resources and strategies for particular groups of applicants. To help you find the material especially relevant to you, I've included icons in the left margins (like the ones shown here) that identify sections of special importance to specific types of scholarship seekers. I've included icons for parents, graduate students, adult returning students, younger students (age 15 or younger), international students, minority students, homeschoolers, student-athletes, and students who wish to study abroad. A depiction of all nine icons can be found in the table of contents.

Sixteen "Guerrilla Tactics" also appear throughout the book. Guerrilla Tactics are unconventional, yet extremely effective, techniques that will give you a competitive edge over other scholarship seekers. You'll find these Guerrilla Tactics alongside one of the many gorilla (pun totally intended!) graphics found in the book. A list of the Guerrilla Tactics and the pages on which they appear is given in the table of contents and index.

Each chapter concludes with a Chapter Summary that distills its main points. The summaries reinforce, in a compact way, the book's most important concepts and provide a Jiminy Cricket-like reminder checklist that you can repeatedly refer back to.