Looking for scholarships and grants to help pay for a college education? When it comes to searching for college scholarships, there are a number of great resources to consider, including your guidance counselor or college financial aid officer. But one of the most useful sources of scholarship information is undoubtedly the Internet, where it's easy to find a number of useful free scholarship directories to get you started on your search for college money.
When searching for scholarships and grants on the Internet, here's a word of caution: beware of scams! Internet based scholarship are easy to spot because of one thing: they ask for money! There are plenty of free web and print resources that offer scholarship and grant listings, and that's where students should look. (Here's more about financial aid and scholarship scams.)
Here are some of the best sites of the Web to find information about college scholarships and grants.
FastWEB
One of the biggest and most popular free scholarship search engines on the Internet is FastWEB, which stands for Financial Aid Search through the Web. This site has been around for a long time -- since 1995, which is ancient history in terms of the web.
Since 1995, over 40 million students have created accounts on FastWEB. Is this a good thing? On the one hand, this site has credibility with scholarship providers, who know that posting on the site is probably the fastest way to reach a large audience. At any given time, there's about 1.5 million scholarships listed on the site, so there's bound to be something that's a match for you.
On the other hand, keep in mind that there's lots of competition for the scholarships and grants on FastWEB -- so it's probably a good idea to not rely solely on this one source for scholarship information. Another disadvantage of this site is that it contains a notorious amount of advertisements.
Although FastWEB is free, students need to register. After they register, students are asked a series of questions, and based on this, they are given a list of scholarships to which they match. The site is updated daily, and students are notified if a new scholarship appears to which they are a match.
CollegeScholarships.Org
For students who want their search to be a little simpler -- and who don't want to register and share lots of information about themselves with a commercial website -- CollegeScholarships.Org might be a better alternative to FastWEB. The site also contains fewer advertisements.
In lieu of filling out a fom and getting back detailed results, this site has a navigation structure and search engine designed to help students search the site for scholarships that suit them best. There's also a good deal of helpful information on this site to read about financial aid in general.
CollegeBoard.com
CollegeBoard, the organization responsible for standardized tests such as the SAT, also offers a large college scholarship search engine on their site. This search engine operateos much like FastWEB in that students fill out a survey (In this case, the survey is much shorter than the FastWEB survey). Then a list of results appear. As is the case with CollegeScholarships.org, no registration is required.
Is this site superior to FastWEB? Depends on how you look at it. FastWEB has a more comprehensive data base, and the longer application process yields results that are more detailed and specific. On the other hand, CollegeBoard.com is much quicker and does not require a registration.
Keep in mind that these three college scholarship databases are not the only three on the web -- but they are three of the best, so use these as a starting place for your search, and check out other sites as well (as long as you're careful to avoid scams). In addition, don't forget to check out other more traditional sources for scholarships, like your guidance counselor and the library. Best of luck finding money for college!
Naomi Rockler-Gladen - Instructional designer and freelance writer, Naomi Rockler-Gladen writes some of Suite101's most read work.
