CollegeNET/Mach 25 Scholarship Search Site Review
http://www.collegenet.com/mach25/app
CollegeNET, Inc., founded in 1977, is a developer of web technology for higher education and nonprofit institutions. Not much other information is available about the owners of this site either on the Net or on the site. The CollegeNET site itself provides ways to search for colleges, apply through their college application database, and find resources for your college search. CollegeNET also operates the Mach 25 scholarship search engine, which has both keyword and profile search features.
Our keyword search using “women” as the keyword yielded 193 scholarship results. Trying “female” as our search term yielded 161 women’s scholarships. A number of these were college-specific scholarships offering female students considerable financial awards—up to full funding for a 4-year degree. (You can find out more about college-specific scholarships by asking your Financial Aid Office or visiting your college’s website.) We suggest that you repeat the “Keyword Search” using one keyword at a time. Each time you run a keyword search, you can save the results to My List, which is a temporary scholarship list that will only be retained until you quit your browser. The results page provides you with a link to the page containing a summary of the scholarship, contact information, award information and statistics, sponsor information, and the sponsoring organization’s URL.
To search by profile, enter your profile information in each of the tabs across the top of the Profile Search box: General, Residence, Personal, Academics, Interests, Employment, and Miscellaneous. We entered some basic profile information: grade level, type of award, state of residence, age, gender, and marital status, and received a spectacular return of 1,978 scholarships! Again, you can save your profile search results to the temporary file, My List, but this list will be deleted when you close your browser window.
The quality of results we got from both the keyword and the profile searches was very good. Admittedly, many of the scholarships were school specific—when we reran our profile search excluding school-specific results, we had a return of 348 scholarships compared with the 1,978 that included them. That said, the results are still excellent, and if you know which school you’ll be attending, you can use that fact to ferret out those scholarships to apply for.
We were impressed with the fact that there is no requirement to share personal information, the ease of use of the Mach 25 search engine, the multiple ways to search for scholarships, the keyword search’s gender-specific returns, and the sheer number of scholarship returns to choose from. CollegeNET is definitely a site to spend some time exploring.
Note: This is one of a number of sites that uses the Wintergreen Orchard House database. You may see some crossover in the results of your scholarship search between these sites.
We give CollegeNET/Mach25 4.5 out of 5:
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