Edvisors/SRN Express Site Review

srnexpressEdvisors/SRN Express

http://www.studentscholarshipsearch.com

A student marketing company operating a portfolio of websites providing information, tools and resources for students. Their portfolio of websites includes a lot of sites focused on student loans NOT scholarships.

It’s not clear what to do when you get to this site. We searched for “scholarships” under “Search our Education Directory” and were presented with a multipage list of links to articles about scholarships—some providing links to actual scholarship sites, some to scholarship search engines, and some just to information articles. We found it time consuming to click through a series of links buried in articles to get any worthwhile scholarship information. Edvisors may have some scholarship links worth pursuing, but it’ll take some work to find them.

The “Free Scholarships” and “$10,000 Scholarship Giveaway” links go to the same program. You are asked to join Edvisor’s ScholarshipPoints program in which you earn points and then use them to be entered into Edvisor’s scholarships contests. If you decide to participate, make sure to read the fine print.

Use the second URL listed above to get to Student Scholarship Search, another site in the Edvisor’s portfolio. Click on the “Scholarship Matcher” tab. This search tool requires only five pieces of information: your current grade level, GPA, state of residency, gender, and ethnic heritage. Begin by entering your current year in school. We entered “College Freshman” and had 17 scholarships returned. You can change the order of scholarships presented by relevance, deadline, or award amount. You can also save each scholarship but you must sign up for an account first. Each item listed provides a link where you can locate eligibility requirements, the deadline, award amount, and comments. It also has a “More Scholarships Like This” list at the bottom of the page. From this second page, you can click on the link to the actual funding organization’s website where you will have to search around for the scholarship. When you’re done searching and saving, click the NEXT button.

We entered 3.3 GPA in the second match field (GPA) and had 19 results returned. Changing the GPA to 3.8 increased the results by 2. We tried again with a 2.5 GPA and had 18 results. It should be noted that all three attempts resulted in the SAME scholarships. Perhaps these scholarships do not have minimum GPA requirements. Click the NEXT button.

We entered “Vermont” in the “State of Residency” menu and had 24 results. Next, we tried “New York” which had 22 results (2 less than Vermont?) Click the NEXT button.

We then entered “girl” in the “Gender” field. Why not “women”? Because the question “When I was born, the doctor told my mother I was a:” had only two options “Girl” and “Boy.” We find this language to be outdated and condescending. This returned 22 results. Click the NEXT button.

Lastly, we entered “Caucasian/White” as our Ethnic Heritage and were presented with 22 results.

There appears to be quite a bit of scholarship overlap in the results for all 5 categories. For example, the “College Answer $1,000 Scholarship” appeared in all of our results. We have to wonder how many scholarships are listed through this website.

Related Links:

A Comprehensive Review of the Leading Scholarship Search Services

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