Top 5 ways to get more scholarship dollars

Everyone is looking for more scholarship dollars to help offset the cost of college, but the key is understanding what strategies are the most effective.

Build the right college list

Many families build a college list based on their student’s right academic and social fit (and often aspirations) and leave the financial aspect until the end, believing in the myth that their are millions of unclaimed private scholarship dollars just waiting for their student to access.

Unfortunately, that approach has two main issues: One, applying for and accessing those private scholarship dollars is far more difficult and time consuming than advertised, and two, it misses the fact that the largest source of scholarship dollars comes from the colleges themselves.

In other words, if the cost of college is important and families need to be in a certain budget and are seeking more scholarship dollars, then the best way to access them is to consider the scholarship policies of the schools they are putting on their college list.

Demonstrated interest

Selective colleges want to protect their “yield,” which is the percentage of students they admit that ultimately enroll. As a business, they desperately need to know which of their many applicants are interested — and how interested — so they can ensure they are meeting their revenue projections.

This is where demonstrated interest comes in. Demonstrated interest is comprised of the many ways a student indicates to a college that they are interested — requesting information from the website, talking with a rep at a college fair, and most significantly, investing the time and money to visit campus.

Demonstrated interest is a way to garner scholarships, because colleges want to further incentivize students who have already shown some interest in their school to bolster their yield.

Essay

As more colleges stopped requiring test scores during the pandemic, the college essay grew in importance as a tool not only for admission, but also for earning scholarships. Many schools practice holistic admissions, which seeks to evaluate the entire student beyond just grades and test scores, particularly in an age where grade inflation is rampant and it can be difficult to compare a GPA between many different high schools.

A well-written essay that showcases the student’s voice (not an over-polished parent’s) can be the ticket to earning more scholarship dollars at schools that value that as part of their admissions process.

Test scores

While it’s true that a large number of colleges do not require test scores for admission, submitting test scores to schools can help students earn more scholarship dollars. In this current era of high school grade inflation, it is increasingly difficult for colleges to evaluate whether a student is academically prepared to succeed. They have used test scores as that standardized measure despite their many flaws, and now an increasing number of colleges are going back to requiring test scores.

Determining whether to provide a test score should be a strategic decision with each school being applied to, but a favorable test score provides an important data point about college readiness at some schools and can unlock more scholarship dollars.

Portals

Many students breathe a big sigh of relief once their college applications are submitted, but overlook the important opportunity that comes afterwards – college portals. Portals are online platforms managed by each college that allow applicants to track their status and later, receive other important information. Once students are admitted, portals may have information on additional scholarship opportunities from the college that are specific to admitted students and not publicized elsewhere.

It is important for students to actively monitor these portals as many opportunities will have deadlines.