Check Out Peterson’s for Scholarship Gold

PetersonsPeterson’s: Big Returns for Scholarship Hunters

http://www.petersons.com

Peterson’s is owned and operated by Nelnet, a company that manages student education loans through its more than 50 North American subsidiaries. They are estimated to currently hold over $25 billion in student loans. Nelnet has a less than stellar reputation, including, among other things, alleged misuse of federal student loan programs and deceptive lending practices.

The Peterson’s site offers information for undergraduates, graduate school, continuing education, and international students wishing to study in the United States. The site also provides information about various colleges and graduate schools, test preparations, completing the FAFSA, and finding financial aid. There’s a scholarship search feature here too.

To search for scholarships, click on Scholarship Search under College Bound. You’ll have a choice of searching by keyword or by choosing filtering categories. We got 194 scholarship listings when we used “women” for our keyword. Although we were familiar with some of the results, others we hadn’t seen before and looked pretty good. Answering the four category questions gave us 2,247 listings! You can further focus your search by adding information in the 15 additional filtering categories in the right-hand column of the search results page. To save any scholarship information or see the contact and application information, however, you will need to sign up for a student account by providing your name, email and home addresses, and phone number. Then you’ll have to go back and search again. This time we got 2,228 results by answering the four category questions and 194 for our keyword search, all looking pretty much like the above results without the profile. We’re not really sure if the profile helped target the results or not, but you sure do get a lot of them.

An interesting bit of information that this site gives you is how many applications the sponsor received for each scholarship and how many were awarded, giving you some idea of what the competition for a given scholarship will be like.

You may not like the owner of the site, but Peterson’s gives you a huge return of scholarships for the relatively painless sign-up process, has some helpful information for the application process, and includes other worthwhile features. We think that overall, the site has enough benefits to make it visit worthy. Check out their College Scholarship Article page for some how-to advice for the college bound.

Related Links:

BBB Business Review

Nelnet on Wikipedia

Overall, we give Petersons 4 out of 5:

4 Mortar Board Rating