Boost efficiency in searching for scholarships
Higher education costs too much. That’s a given.
The preferred solution to the problem of the extraordinary cost of higher education is scholarships — because free money is the best kind of money.
The central challenge with scholarships, however, is maximizing your return on investment of time and effort.
Sallie Mae, the national private student loan company, recently bought Scholly, a scholarship search engine designed to help families make the most of such time and effort.
“We found that efficiency is the problem,” Brian Babineau, chief brand officer for Sallie
Mae, told me. “The biggest barrier to applying (for scholarships) is that kids don’t think they can win, so they might believe the ROI of their time is terrible. We want to make it easier for them to win, and also make them feel like winning is a possibility.”
San Antonio
The San Antonio Area Foundation offers more than 120 scholarships totaling $9 million for local students.
Its flagship opportunity, called “Legacy Scholarship,” is a meritbased program worth $40,000 over four years for 80 students from Bexar County planning to attend public or private universities in Texas. That application is due during a high school student’s junior year.
From Dec. 1 through Feb. 24, the most efficient way for seniors in the San Antonio area to apply for scholarships is through the Area Foundation.
Via a single application, prospective students can compete for dozens of scholarships as the foundation’s application platform matches their applications to scholarships that they’re eligible to receive.
Actually, the Area Foundation has two applications. Students can submit a “universal” and a “common” application, said Jennifer Ballesteros, the Area Foundation’s executive director of scholarship and relief programs. Some scholarships are administered solely by the organization’s staff, while other scholarships are awarded in consultation with outside committees.
Students should apply via both methods to increase their odds of landing money. Just two applications to put oneself in the running for more than a hundred scholarships seems efficient to me.
Many scholarships through the Area Foundation are targeted to a student’s family background, choice of major, intended career or a specific campus. As a result of such narrow focus, some scholarships are less competitive and more easily obtained. Every year, Ballesteros said, “There is money left on the table, and we do want that money to be spent.”
Bellesteros said that money for archeology majors, to cite one example, has gone unclaimed in the past. In terms of ROI, an uncompetitive scholarship is the best kind.
Houston
Similarly, at the Greater Houston Community Foundation website, high schoolers and their parents can efficiently seek opportunities available to them.
Courtney Grymonprez, scholarship manager at the Community Foundation, pointed me to the 48 scholarships listed on its site.
Like many scholarships available via the San Antonio Area Foundation, most scholarships on the Greater Houston Community Foundation’s site are narrowly focused on children of certain employers, or from a particular school or community, or who suffer from a medical condition, or who seek to pursue a specific course of study. That specificity means that for students who qualify, such scholarships may not be overly competitive.
“There are years when certain scholarships are not awarded because nobody applied. Sometimes there are scholarships for one particular high school. Local scholarships are the best way of having really good chances,” Grymonprez said.
High school guidance counselors are a good resource for finding these types of scholarships, she said.
Besides the scholarships that Grymonprez oversees for the Community Foundation, she recommends all Texans look at the Houston Livestock and Rodeo site, where money raised from the event is earmarked for higher education.
She is quick to point out that not all scholarships there are targeted to agriculture or “rodeo-themed.”
The National Scholarship Providers Association, an advocacy group, reports that $100 million in college scholarships go unclaimed each year.
At the scholarship search engine Scholly, Sallie Mae’s Babineau echoed the idea that some money is out there waiting to be claimed.
“We want to change the narrative that scholarships are only for students with a 4.0 GPA and 1,600 SATs,” Babineau said. “There are scholarships available for the person you are, the things you want to be and do, your hobbies. There are local scholarships available in your town. We are trying to create awareness around that.”
Accessing regional foundations and a scholarship search engine feels like an important way for students to increase the return on their investment of time and effort.
I spent six minutes to create a parent profile on Scholly, after which the app returned with $131,250 in 11 “potential scholarships” for my child. After I inputted some more data — another five minutes — based on my oldest daughter’s extracurricular activities, academic interests and personal background, the app increased the amount of potential scholarships to $151,750.
Scholly is just one of several scholarship search engines that parents and students can use to quickly identify plausible scholarships. While the best search engines may change over time, a Google search will quickly give your student a few places to start.
Maybe this opens up the concept to students that hustling to apply for college scholarships is a worthwhile use of time. Can 30 minutes of online work qualify them for $500? Can two hours of essay writing and filling out forms get you $2,000? A high schooler is unlikely to earn that much on a per hour basis in any other legal activity they could engage in.