After the thrill of college acceptance letters comes the reality of figuring out how to pay the cost to actually attend the school of your choice. One Philadelphia English teacher, 30-year-old Zac Chase, has a creative solution to funding his master's in education policy and management program at Harvard: He's crowdsourcing the cost.
Chase told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the idea came to him because the school he's taught at for the past four years, Science Leadership Academy, has such a strong entrepreneurship and social media focus. He estimates the cost of tuition, room and board at $60,000, so when a merit scholarship fell through and he found that he could only afford to borrow $20,000, the lessons he'd been teaching students inspired his plan to come up with the other $40,000. Chase doesn't want a handout. Instead, he wants funders to consider their donation an investment that they'll get something out of—access to his educational experience. On his "Chasing Harvard" project site, he writes