CollegiateFunding Scholarship Site Review

CollegiateFundingCollegiateFunding: A Whole Lotta Information Sharing for Very Little Payoff

http://www.collegiatefunding.com

The company profile for CollegiateFunding is another self-congratulatory couple of paragraphs about how they help students find colleges and ways to pay for it. But nothing else about who they are, or even how to contact them. We found virtually nothing on the Net about them, except they’re not to be confused with Collegiate Funding Solutions or Collegiate Funding Services. We did find a Better Business Bureau link (see below) that indicates they’re primarily in the business of student loans.

With the big, FIND YOUR SCHOOL NOW! button on every page, Collegiate Funding seems mainly geared toward college searches. On their Home page in the right-hand column, however, is a list of 25 scholarship links. At the bottom of this list is a “View More” link that presents a list of 90 links for scholarships and grants (including the original 25 from the first page).

Clicking on one of these links will take you to Collegiate Funding’s College Student Resource Center. The scholarship page from funding organization’s website is shown in the window below the page header. Unfortunately, the header for this page takes up roughly one-third of the screen and stays put when you page down, making it hard to read the scholarship information without constantly scrolling.

If you click on the “Scholarships” tab at the top of the page, you’re taken to a page containing several paragraphs of very general scholarship information and an article about an unusual college-funding opportunity for the students of New Haven, Connecticut. Under this article is a link that reads “Once we have your questionnaire, Collegiate Funding can help you locate the particular scholarships for which you may qualify and guide you in the process of making your application.” Clicking on this link will send you back to the top of the same page to the FIND YOUR SCHOOL NOW! button.

When we clicked on that button, we were taken to a “Student Survey” where we were required to give our name, email and street address, phone number, and birth date in order to receive our “free report in minutes!” (Note: This is a survey, not an account sign-up. If you want to come back to this site and search again, you will have to repeat the survey.) After eight more pages, we were pretty weary of the Student Survey and wondering if all this required information sharing was really going to be worth the results. We hit the SUBMIT button and got a note that read: “Thank You, your personalized report has been emailed.”

The report we received read “Thank you for allowing Collegiate Funding to assist with your Student Choice options. Click on the link below to begin your FAFSA Filing.” This link took us to the Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) site. The email contained no scholarships, which means that they have all of your information, and you got nothing in return. You can easily file your FAFSA by going to http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/ directly.

Our advice? Don’t waste your time with this site. We give it 1 out of 5:

1 Mortar Board Rating

 

 

Related Links:

Sources of Money 8: Club Scholarships or Collegiate Funding

BBB Business Review