Taylor Zickefoose has become an expert in digging up scholarships and filling out applications for them.

She has scoured Web sites, exhausted the resources at her high school's guidance office and tried her luck at the Community Foundation of Frederick County.

"If I have seen the word ‘scholarship,' I've grabbed that paper," said Zickefoose, a Catoctin High School graduate who served as the student member of the Frederick County school board this past year.

"In the national ones, you are competing against millions of students," she said. "The local ones were my big target. I must have done 30 or more."

This fall, Zickefoose will be heading out to High Point University in North Carolina, but she is nervous because she hasn't been able to secure all the money she needs to pay for college.

A private institution, High Point charges a little more than $33,000 per year for tuition, room and board.

Zickefoose has already earned $60,000 in merit-based scholarships from the school. She is also applying for unsubsidized Stafford loans from the federal government. But even with that, she still has to come up with more than $12,000 for each of the four years at the college.

Worried about high interest rates, she is trying to avoid looking at private student loans.

"Getting a loan with a decent interest is difficult," said Zickefoose, who tried to calculate her debt if she is not able to get any grant or scholarship funding. "I will practically be paying for a second education."

So Zickefoose is placing her hopes on her applications for scholarships.

But according to experts, so are hundreds of other students who are trying to pay for college this year.

"Students are becoming smart," said Betsy Day, president of the Community Foundation of Frederick County.

Driven by tight family budgets and a fear of leaving college with more debt than they can handle, this year more students are applying for more scholarships, Day said.

"The competition is tough," she said. "Students are aware that their family budgets are tighter and they are trying to help out."

Compared to last year, when about 300 students applied for scholarships through the Community Foundation, this year the foundation has received 380 applications, Day said.

At the same time, scholarship funds, which are supposed to accrue interest and depend on the market conditions, have also been negatively affected by the market crash and the decline in the economy, Day said.

Thanks to generous donors, however, the Community Foundation has been able to pull through and disburse the same amount of dollars this year as it did a year ago – about $330,000, Day said.

While Zickefoose is aware of these factors, she is hoping to get a positive response on at least a few of the scholarship applications she has sent out.

Meanwhile, she also has a job lined up with State Farm Insurance for the summer. Everything she makes there will also go toward college payments, Zickefoose said.

Her mother, Stacy Zickefoose, said wishes she and her husband had been able to secure some college savings for their daughters.

"It took everything we had to keep us going," Stacy Zickefoose said. "Either way we don't have any savings for the girls. … It probably didn't help that we didn't go to college."

Now Stacy Zickefoose wants to make sure her daughter gets a better opportunity. She said she and her husband would do what they can to help with paying for college. She has also told her daughters that if things get tough, they can always dip into their 401K and retirement funds to help pay for college education.

"There are just more opportunities for you if you go to college," Stacy Zickefoose said.

E-mail Margarita Raycheva at mraycheva@gazette.net.