As the cost of a college education continues to rise, many Utah students are overlooking alternatives to shouldering mountains of student debt.

In fact, some education leaders estimate as much as 50 percent of scholarships and financial aid goes untapped, leaving students little option but to take out loans.

"Access to a reasonably priced education is shrinking around the United States," said Al Church, principal of the Academy of Math, Engineering and Science High School in Cottonwood Heights. "Utah has some pretty good deals, but still, the creeping increase is felt by everyone."

Traditional methods of taking out more loans aren't sustainable and are deterring low-income students from getting a college education, Church said.

While federal financial aid has plateaued in recent years, Church said high-school and college leaders need to do a better job of pushing scholarship opportunities that could help students get their diplomas without weighing them down with loans.

"If we are going to tell poor students to get to college, we are going to have to work 10 times as hard to get financial support," he said.

A counselor-to-student ratio of roughly one to 500 in the state doesn't help. High-school counselors are severely overloaded, Church added, leaving them little time to hunt down scholarships for students.

"To fill out scholarship applications for any student — let alone first-generation kids — is pretty complex and daunting," he said. "In a large high school where you don't have enough administrators or counselors, they're not going to have the time to commit."

At his school, that ratio is a little better, with about 400 students to every 1.5 counselors. The charter school requires ninth- and 10th-graders to find scholarship opportunities as part of their English curriculum.

The 2005 graduating class left with a total of $450,000 in financial aid, one of which was a Gates Millennium Scholarship.

"We'd like to see every kid who leaves an early-college high school leave with some kind of financial award, even if it's just to pay for books," Church said.

John Curl, financial-aid director at the University of Utah, said he is also trying to get students to look at alternative financing before resorting to loan debt. Federal Pell grants are usually the first avenue, Curl said, and then they explore options like work-study programs.

Still, the ease of simply taking out a loan often trumps other choices, he said.

"The idea that they can invest the time to hunt for scholarships becomes difficult for them," he said.