College didn’t register on Billie Jo Day’s radar when she was a child in small-town Shoals, Indiana.

“There was no way to conceive of going to college,” says Day, 35, whose parents didn’t have college degrees at the time.

In middle school, Day registered for Indiana’s 21st Century Scholars Program. Signing on meant that if she maintained strong grades and met other criteria, she’d earn tuition help at a state school.

Day kept up her end of the bargain and applied to just one school — Indiana University–Bloomington — where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 2001.

“This program allowed me to be very, very sure that, if I put in the work and the effort, I would go to college,” says Day, who is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Because many students don’t pay a college’s sticker price, most have no idea what college will cost until their financial aid award letters arrive mere months before classes start. That doesn’t give cash-strapped students much time to prepare for a potentially massive financial undertaking and may dissuade them from applying at all.

[Learn how to slash college costs by earning credit in high school.]

“We have students applying to college without having a good idea of how much it’ll end up costing them,” says Robert Kelchen, assistant professor of higher education at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. Kelchen has studied how allowing students to file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid before senior year or discover their Pell Grant eligibility in middle school can increase college access.

While those ideas aren’t realities, some resources do exist to demystify college costs by locking in financial aid in middle school or early high school.

— State and local programs: One source of such aid is available to students through state, local or institutional promise programs.

To participate, students often sign a contract in middle school or early high school, guaranteeing that if they meet certain academic, behavioral and extracurricular requirements, they’ll earn a tuition discount at a state institution.

[Explore universities with the highest and lowest in-state tuition.]

“Fundamentally what these are about is signalling to students that college is not financially out of reach for them,” says Thomas Harnisch, assistant director of state relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

Oklahoma’s Promise is one such program. The state covers tuition at an Oklahoma public university — or pays a portion at a state private school — for participants who make good grades, apply for financial aid and fall beneath a certain income threshold. A similar institutional program — the Carolina Covenant at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill — guarantees eligible low-income students that they’ll graduate debt-free, using a combination of grants, scholarships and work-study.

While Indiana and Oklahoma have made state promises work since the 1990s, others have met the chopping block when budgetary or political climates changed. The Wisconsin Covenant, a similar state promise program, recently met its demise. The last cohort to sign the pledge was in September 2011.

— Scholarships: Scholarship money “usually isn’t awarded until the student’s senior year of high school, which can be too late to impact (a student’s) ambitions about college or where they’re choosing to apply,” says Preston Silverman, CEO and co-founder of a scholarship platform called Raise.me.

Raise seeks to solve that problem by promising awards of around a few hundred dollars — called microscholarships — when students complete certain tasks. Participants sign on as early as the ninth grade and earn cash from participating universities when they volunteer or earn an A in English, for example. A range of schools, from the University of Rochester to Oberlin College, participate.

Students can never start the scholarship search too early. Some corporate scholarships, including Kohl’s Cares Scholarship Program and Raytheon’s Math Moves U, are available for students to apply for before senior year. Other scholarship organizations, such as Dosomething.org, which helps students organize social and charitable campaigns, also make their college scholarships available to younger students.

— Net price calculators: Even without promise programs and microscholarships, students can get a sense of what college will cost by looking at net price calculators.

These tools, which colleges must display online, allow students to input financial information in order to estimate how much college will cost after subtracting anticipated first-year aid. Students may discover that their test scores or grades guarantee them a scholarship. They might find out how much in federal Pell Grants they can expect to use.

[Discover 10 tools that give you a tailored estimate of what you’ll pay for college.]

Net price calculators can be difficult to use, however, and often provide first-year aid figures, which don’t give students a complete picture of college costs.

Still, any information is better than none. “The earlier you can get people information the better,” says Seton Hall’s Kelchen.

Trying to fund your education? Get tips and more in the U.S. News Paying for College center.

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Lock in College Financial Aid Before Senior Year of High School originally appeared on usnews.com