Scholarship Search Help from Websites
Choose the Best Website to Help with Finding Ways to Pay for College
Sep 12, 2008
Traditional places for high school seniors to search for scholarships are the college where the student is applying, local organizations or companies and the public library. However, there are many other places, such as specialized Internet websites that can help in the search. Most are free and offer many scholarship opportunities after an online questionnaire is completed.
Scholarship Search Websites Rated
The Financial Aid website reports a rating for the following websites according to recall and precision of each website's database. Precision is the relevant initial match of scholarships with the student or parent who answers the questionnaire. “A database with a low precision score will force users to read through hundreds of irrelevant awards.” Recall measures the “coverage of the database, indicating whether the results include all awards for which the student is qualified, or whether some awards are missing from the database.”
The top four websites were rated as follows:
- FastWeb at 100% recall and 100%
- Scholarships.com at 93% recall and 75% precision
- Peterson’s at 87% recall and 26% precision
- College Board at 78% recall and 40% precision
Each of the four websites offer scholarship and grant databases to help pay for college. However, each has different tools to help the student and/or parents.
Websites Offer Databases and Organizational Tools for College Planning
FastWeb is a free website that helps students choose a college, pay for school and find internships and jobs. To find one of the 1.3 million scholarships, students or parents need to to fill out an online questionnaire. From this questionnaire, a list of scholarships and/or grants is generated. Students can then click on the scholarship and decide if they want to apply. FastWeb creates a calendar for each month when the applications are due. In addition to scholarships, there are job and internship opportunities listed as well as sweepstakes to enter.
Scholarships.com helps students and their parents find money for a college education. Their scholarship search is free as well as their financial aid information. The database of 2.7 million scholarships and grants is updated regularly. Each student creates a personal profile where scholarships of highest relevance are listed.
Peterson's has 1.68 million scholarships, grants and awards in their database. It is a free website that helps to search colleges and shows options of how to pay for school. In addition, it helps with planning timelines. Also, it offers admissions essay help and test prep tips.
College Board Scholarship Search is a free online tool to help students and parents find scholarships, internships, grants and loans. They have 2,300 sources of college funding. There are tools for creating a profile, comparing college aid amongst colleges of interest, a college cost calculator, Expected Family Contribution (EFC) calculator, student loan repayment calculator, parent debt calculator, parent loan repayment calculator.
There are many free websites on the Internet to help parents and students find additional financial help or college admisssions help. Each site offers something a little different, and it helps to do a little research before registering.
