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Microscholarships: An Instant Conversation

Starter: Yeah, have you heard of this new group in San Francisco called ?

Explainer: It's all about microfunding for scholarships. High-schoolers sign up and if they make good grades and participate in certain school and community activities, they earn college-scholarship money along the way.

Impressive Depth: The novel idea is being championed by some heavy hitters, like Facebook, the and a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs called . The microscholarships are funded by various colleges, businesses and nonprofits.

Quote You Can Quote: I read somewhere that Preston Silverman, the founder and CEO of Raise Labs, told Gigaom: "We're rethinking how students access financial aid for college. The system is really complicated. ... And it happens at the end of high school, when it can be too late."

Closer: So, you can see why Raise Labs the 2013 Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition at the University of Pennsylvania and took $75,000 in prize money back to California.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Linton Weeks joined NPR in the summer of 2008, as its national correspondent for Digital News. He immediately hit the campaign trail, covering the Democratic and Republican National Conventions; fact-checking the debates; and exploring the candidates, the issues and the electorate.

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