Finding Scholarships with the Scholarship Detective

Scholarship DetectiveScholarshipDetective

http://www.scholarshipdetective.com/

ScholarshipDetective was established in 2007. This is another site whose owners fail to identify themselves upfront. We think, based on IP address, that the site belongs to Gen Tanabe, who also owns MoolahSPOT and, apparently, CollegeIsPower, SuperCollege, and the Gen and Kelly Tanabe Scholarship sites. One wonders why the site owners are so shy about stating clearly who they are.

ScholarshipDetective is a straight-up one-page search feature. Enter your grade level, what year you need the scholarships for, your keywords, and away you go. Of course, in many instances, what you see is what you get, and that holds true with this site. We entered “engineering” as our keyword and got six listings, the first four of which were recognizable “scholarships” from other search sites. Using “women” as a keyword netted us 10 listings (with the same first four as above). Not a great return.

Clicking on the name of the scholarship takes you to the sponsoring organization’s website. It’s up to you to find the scholarship information and application page. Of note, clicking on the scholarship name to go to the website is kind of an odd experience. You expect something to happen—the page to change or another window to pop up, and nothing does. Until you discover that another tab has opened up in your browser and there’s your site.

With the paucity of results and the fact that almost 50% of those meager results are “scholarships” offered by other search sites, there’s really not much here worth spending your time on.

We give ScholarshipDetective 2 out of 5:

2 Mortar Board Rating