The Top 5 Scholarship Search Websites
If you’re hoping to fund some, or all, of your college career with scholarships, you’re in luck: There are billions of dollars in scholarship and grant money awarded each year.
You don’t need to be a valedictorian or football star to win scholarship money — there are scholarships for all types of students. But you do need to put some effort into your search.
1. Scholarships.com: The free scholarship search is one of the most established and robust, tracking a reported $19 billion in scholarships. “It’s basically like an eHarmony site for money,” says Elizabeth Hartley, an independent education consultant and owner of Scholarship Gold Consulting.
After you fill out a profile, the site will use your criteria to filter through all scholarships to generate a short list.
“Based on your answers, it’ll try to match the student to scholarships that may be a fit,” Hartley says.
2. Fastweb.com: Fastweb, owned by parent company Monster.com, is also a free scholarship search provider that claims to have more than 1.5 million scholarships in its database. Like scholarships.com, the site will find scholarships in its database and email you matches, deadlines and newsletters.
“I like it because it’s got such a huge database,” says Monica Matthews, who helped her son win more than $100,000 in college scholarships and is author of “How to Win College Scholarships.”
Expect a flood of emails as you begin your scholarship search, Matthews says. She also recommends creating an email address specifically to field scholarship searches.
3. Chegg.com: Chegg is a textbook website that has a scholarship search function, offering more than 25,000 scholarships. The site also offers online tutors to help students with their scholarship essays.
“They’re definitely trying to stay on top of what’s new on the market in terms of scholarships,” Hartley says.
4. Cappex.com: Cappex allows students to search both schools and scholarships, with a database of more than $11 billion in scholarships. A proprietary calculator also allows students to gauge their chances of getting into prospective schools with user-generated data.
And while the site doesn’t break down students’ chances of getting a scholarship, Stezala says she likes it because it provides a “reality check” on whether they may get admitted to schools that give out a lot of scholarship money.
5. The College Board: The College Board’s comprehensive BigFuture site helps students look up information about colleges and how to pay for school. Its scholarships search engine provides information on more than $6 billion in scholarships, financial aid and internships.
Read Deborah Ziff Soriano’s full article here.
