College Greenlight Site Review

College Greenlight Site Review

College Greenlight

http://www.collegegreenlight.com/

College Greenlight is another site owned and operated by Cappex. The Home page has links to three sections: “Get Ready for College,” “Find Your Dream School,” and “Fund Your Education,” all of which will take you to a page to “Create [your] Account.” You’ll need to do this whether you’re choosing a college, want admissions tips and advice, or are looking for scholarship leads.

Search for Scholarships:

  • Click on the “button” under Fund Your Education.
  • Enter your email address, create a password, and click on CREATE ACCOUNT.
  • Enter your contact information including name, gender, birth date, ethnicity, home address, phone number, interested majors, and high school graduation date. Click CONTINUE.
  • Enter required fields about your academic background including high school and GPA. Click CONTINUE.
  • Enter the college preferences you choose. Click CONTINUE.

The profile form and the Dashboard results looked suspiciously familiar, and sure enough, another Cappex site. MeritAid, as well as the parent Cappex.com site both use the same data-gathering form and Student Dashboard page set-up.

The Student Dashboard, in addition to searching for matching scholarships, allows you to look for colleges, complete your profile, visit your College Center (for a list of matching colleges and messages from colleges interested in you), check out the site’s other tools for getting into college, take the “Cap Challenge” (lame), and connect with Facebook. You can also take their survey if you’re interested. If you’re interested in College Greenlight’s college search information, you’ll find that on the Dashboard under Other Tools. There’s a merit aid directory (looks useful), admissions coach (not much there), admissions tips (the recommendation letter checklist looks very helpful), and the Greenlight blog (current).

To go to your scholarship results, click on My Scholarships. With our profile “incomplete,” we got 80 returns on our scholarship search. The listing gives scholarship name, award amount, application deadline, application effort, competition, and a drop-down menu of “next step” choices. The scholarship details, available by on clicking the scholarship name, also give a scholarship overview, requirements, and sponsor contact information and URL. We were initially presented with 15 results which were really quite decent scholarships and well worth taking a look at. When we requested all 80 results, the story was a little different. Of those 80 results, 39 were actively billed as contests, and we suspect that had we looked at all of the details, many of the others on the list would fall into this category too. You will find very similar scholarship results on the other two Cappex sites. Completing our profile gleaned us 88 results, some of which were much more on target for our profile. You can save the scholarships you’re interested in by choosing “Will Apply” from the Next Steps drop-down.

As with College Greenlight’s sibling and parent sites, the sign-up process isn’t grueling and the returns are pretty good. If you avoid all the contest results, you might find a few scholarship leads worth pursuing here. One doesn’t seem to be any better than the others, and the information provided on all three sites is largely the same. MeritAid.com is targeted toward merit-based scholarships, and so tends to have more school-sponsored scholarships results. Other than that, it’s pretty much a spin-the-bottle choice between the three. None of them are awful, but none are stellar either.

We gave College Greenlight 3 out 5 five:

3 Mortar Board Rating