CollegeScholarships.com: Is It Worth A Visit?
http://www.collegescholarships.com
CollegeScholarships.com is run by College Connection, founded in 1995 by a group of parents who, after going through the college financial aid process with their own kids, felt there was a need for improvement in the process. Their About Us statement indicates that they use one of the largest and most up-to-date Financial Aid Databases available, but it doesn’t mention which one that is.
CollegeScholarships.com is mainly in the business of helping you find scholarships specifically targeted to you, but you’ll also find a college search feature and a page devoted to resources for students, including scholarship and college links.
There are a number of links on the Home page and the Scholarship Search page for lists of scholarships by major, state, minority and gender, and special type. Some of these links will take you to scholarship lists, but many others will require you to create an account before giving you any information.
Clicking on the Find Scholarships tab brings you to a search page with a limited number of information fields to fill out. This looks like a way to get scholarship results without getting too personal. When we filled out the form completely, we got no results. With just our gender, we got 3 results, one of which was a contest. This way to search is not worth the trouble.
You can do a more detailed search, but you’ll have to complete a Student Profile. Click on the GET STARTED button and enter your information in each section of the Create a New Profile page: Personal Information, Profile Email, Academic Info, and More Information.
We chose to enter only the minimum required fields and had 24 scholarship results returned based on our gender and state of residence. Providing more information will increase your results. In a more targeted search with information entered in all fields, we got a list of 85 scholarships, more than triple the number of the limited-field search results. When you click on one of the scholarship results, you’ll be taken to a new page that provides detailed information on that scholarship along with a link to the funding organization’s website where you can apply for the scholarship. The scholarship information includes the number of awards, amount, deadline, eligibility requirements, mailing address, phone number, contact person, and their email address. From this page, you can go Back to Results, Save this Scholarship, Apply Now, or Create Request Letter. The last option opens a PDF file containing a professionally written application request letter already addressed to the sponsoring organization and signed by you. All you need to do is print it out, sign it, and send it off, which, admittedly, is of limited value if you apply online.
The quality of the scholarship results on CollegeScholarships.com is a little discouraging. Most of the entries on our list were essay contests, many of which we’d never seen before. If you like to enter contests, then there’s a lot to look through here. Otherwise, there are better sites to visit. In addition, we generally don’t appreciate sites that lead to you believe you’re getting no-strings-attached information only to tell you to sign up—just come out with the bad news, already. CollegeScholarships.com has some seemingly nice features that we haven’t seen on other sites. We loved the idea of the automated application request letter (although how much real value it adds for students is questionable). However, this site isn’t going to be high up on our list of places to make a serious search for scholarships.
We rate this site 2.5 out of 5:
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