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Guide to the Internet for Scholarship Seekers

One more time, all together now, “Thank you for the internet!”. The internet saves enormous time and expense by allowing you to access websites specifically designed to help scholarship seekers, visit scholarship websites to learn more about the judging, and, in some cases, apply for scholarships on-line. Not surprisingly, the Internet also presents a number of opportunities to spend money without result. This page discusses the good, the bad and the ugly on the web.

Scholarship Websites

How many of these sites should you use? Sue is very obsessive and would try to use them all. Jennifer is much more reasonable and suggests that you pick five or six that seem most suitable and go for it.

Key Word Searches

Go back to your personal assessment and select interests, hobbies, types of community service. Now, using a search engine such as Google, enter the interest and the word “scholarship”. We entered “chess and scholarship in MSN search and got over 8,000 hits. One site, http://www.successchess.com/WeibelChess/Scholarships.html, listed 22 chess scholarships. We tried “girl scouts and scholarship” in Google and got 43,000 hits, starting with www.jfg.girlscouts.org, that listed 50 girl scout scholarship sources. We even found scholarships for spelunking (that’s cave exploration for those of you who haven’t been studying your SAT word lists!).

On-line Scams

Be oh so careful when searching for scholarships on-line. As in every area of the internet, schemes for fleecing people have developed in the scholarship arena. The typical scams involve application fees, “guarantees”, fees for publicly available money and requests for an unusual amount of personal information.

Paid Searches

Usually paid searches suggest that they have access to otherwise unlisted scholarships. This scenario is very unlikely. Considering the tremendous availability of free databases, there is no good reason to pay for scholarship information.

“Guarantees”

Guarantees of any kind are a huge red flag. It just isn’t possible for an organization to make guarantees about winning an award and those who guarantee matches are hyping their services; legitmate scholarship search sites do not need to rely on BIG PRINT and lots of exclamation points!!!!! And possibly bolding and underlining to describe their services.

Application Fees

Beware of any scholarship fund that requests a fee. We have heard of funds that essentially turn the fees into scholarships and if so, terrific. But, be sure that the ratio of scholarships to money collected is reasonable. If you can’t get that level of information from their website, it’s not worth the key strokes to get involved.

Contact Information

Legitimate businesses will list methods for contacting them beyond and e-mail address and PO Box. If you can’t talk to them, they may not exist as a real business.

The FTC has developed several excellent publication s on the issue of scholarship scams. Try http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/ouchalrt.htm for a copy of “Ouch! Students Getting Stung Trying to Find $$$ for College”.
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