Horry County students earn over $63 million in scholarship money

Horry County Schools announced Wednesday that the combined 2016 graduating class was offered more than $63 million in scholarship money.

Spokeswoman Teal Britton stressed that not all the money is accepted by students, and the number is used to gauge how competitive the district is.

“The total value that you see associated with that is what was offered to our graduating class,” said Britton. “You can have a single student sometimes who is so highly recruited by so many prestigious schools that a single student could warrant a million (dollars) in scholarships themselves, but they can’t utilize all the scholarship money.”

The amount of scholarship offers fell by $4 million from last year’s $67.6 million, which was a record amount.

Although this is the first year the amount has fallen, it’s still a large increase since 2006.

Major gains

In 2006, the 1,628 graduating students were offered a total of $34 million in scholarships, amounting to a rough average of $20,900 per student.

This year, the $63.5 million amounted to an average of over $26,000 per student.

Of the 2,421 graduating students this year, 10 percent graduated with honors, 78 percent plan to attend a two-year or four-year college or university, five percent plan to go into the armed forces and nine percent plan on entering employment immediately.

The largest percentage of students who planned on going to a post-secondary school were part of HCS Early College High School: 94 percent of the 90 students planned on going on to a higher education institution.

At Conway High School, 65 percent of the school’s 282 graduates planned on attending a post-secondary school. It was the lowest percentage of all the schools.

Click here to see detailed information for each school.

This story was originally published July 14, 2016 at 2:35 PM with the headline "Horry County students earn over $63 million in scholarship money."