Grants, Scholarships, and MORE

College Grants and Scholarships Listed on the World Wide Web

If you want basic, general, overall information about college grants and scholarships, then please go to the Financial Aid Basics page. However, listed below, you will find a list of resources that will help you find grants, scholarships, and some loans for college.

Many of the books and online "free money" databases make it sound so very easy to find the right grant for you. For MOST people, it is NOT that easy. We want to emphasize that, for most people, it takes a lot of time, effort, and patience to obtain grant and scholarship money. Many grants, scholarships, and free money are awarded on very specific criteria. For that reason, we have listed a number of what we feel are very good resources for finding college grants, scholarships, and some loans. Hopefully, some of these resources will help.

There are organizations on the Web that will provide financial aid search services, for free. These services will allow you to input information into a search box and then search for grants that are listed in their database (computer). We strongly recommend that you read the EXCELLENT article at College Scholarships.org that compares different grant and scholarship search services such as Fastweb, Scholarships.com, and many more. This article goes a long way to explain why there are varying results with the searches http://www.collegescholarships.org/search/helpful-reviews.htm.

These services allow access to millions of grants. The services are a convenient, quick, easy way to help you find grants that are available for you.

Definitely, the search services are NOT perfect. If you receive a list of grants, then probably many on the list will not apply to you. Hopefully, some will apply to you, but a majority of "hits" will not be for you. Many of the scholarship search services ask you to fill out a personal profile so that the computer program can search the database in order to find the right grants for you, based on your profile. ALWAYS remember to avoid revealing sensitive information (like social security numbers). There are plenty of advertisements on the free scholarship services so read the pages carefully to make sure that you do not receive unwanted material. PLEASE pay attention to the web pages as some of the pages/forms may be ADVERTISEMENTS for colleges that you are filling out and NOT the scholarship website's profile/registration. Make sure that you are filling out the scholarship website's profile.

There are pros and cons to these free online scholarship search services, but it appears to us that the pros outweigh the cons. Of the searches that we performed on some of the following search services, we have to admit, that we were presented with some encouraging leads. As we stated above, out of the lists that we received, only some of the grants looked like something that we could use. However, it is possible that only a few leads may be all that we need. If you do not receive a list that contains many grants, then you may want to try the survey again, but change some of the options / criteria that you used before. Maybe you were too specific the first time around.

PLEASE NOTE: BE CAREFUL:

We decided to write the following statement about being careful on applying for scholarships that MAY no longer be available. From our experience of trying to list scholarships that are currently available, we have found that many scholarships stay on the World Wide Web, although the organizations that at one time funded the scholarships, NO LONGER fund the scholarship. We have found that all the information is on the organization's web page, BUT, the date for applying for that scholarship may be a couple years old. Our best advice is that IF a scholarship is listed on a web page AND the date of application is more than a year old, then it is VERY PROBABLE that the scholarship is NOT AVAILABLE. Our best advice is that if you are interested in a scholarship that has older information, then PLEASE TRY TO CONTACT them to see IF the scholarship is currently being offered. Definitely, a number of organizations may delay funding a scholarship for a year or two. However, there are many scholarships that are found on web pages that have been there for years that have NOT been funded for years.

We hope that the following Free Grant and Scholarship Search Services will present you with plenty of options:

YouTube Video: How to Find College Grants and Scholarships is a short six-minute video that gives you an overall look at where to find college grants and scholarships. If you have no idea on where to start to find financial aid, then this video will give you a good idea on how to go about finding free money in the form of financial aid, grants, and scholarships for college or trade schools for a variety of groups of people such as nursing students, single moms, women, traditional students, non-traditional students, and just about any U.S. Citizen seeking scholarships with the least amount of eligibility requirements.

College Scholarships.org is a good website to start with, so that you can get an overall idea of what searching for financial aid is all about. A free scholarship search engine has been added to the website. Listed are sources of information by different criteria such as ethnicity, gender, financial status, geographic location, and more.

Fastweb is a scholarship service that is free. It is part of the Monster.com company. Fastweb is one of the more popular and recognized free scholarship search services. You need to register and make a number of selections for your profile. Like most of the free search services, if you do not like the results, then go back and change (edit) some of your original profile criteria and then perform another search. PLEASE pay attention to the web pages as some of the pages/forms may be ADVERTISEMENTS for colleges that you are filling out and NOT the scholarship website's profile/registration.

Scholarships.com is an excellent site to find out all kinds of information about college, especially financial aid. Okay, this is only my opinion, but it is not as easy to access all the information that Scholarships.com has. STILL, I think that it is great website to visit, but it seems to have gone the way that many of these scholarship websites have gone and that is to ask you for a profile and then the organization will try to provide a list of scholarships matching your profile. For some people, this works, but for other people the list is not as good as they wanted to see. Lists of scholarships based on different criteria can be found at the bottom of the scholarships.com main web page. You can click on menu items without filling out a type of registration form. Their scholarship search service is located at http://www.scholarships.com/scholarship-search.aspx. It is free, but you need to fill out a profile. PLEASE pay attention to the web pages as some of the pages/forms may be ADVERTISEMENTS for colleges that you are filling out and NOT the scholarship website's profile/registration.

CollegeBoard.com is a very well-respected organization that has been involved with college education since 1900. The search engine for scholarships is free, but you need to fill out a questionnaire/register. The scholarship search page can be found at: https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/scholarship-search. Still, you can find some very good information without signing up by clicking the links on their web pages.

UNIGO.com has taken over some services such as ScholarshipExperts.com and Campus Discovery. Many of the scholarships offered by ScholarshipExperts.com and Campus Discovery continue to be offered by UNIGO. UNIGO offers a lot of information about scholarships.

NICHE.com is another service similar to UNIGO. NICHE will fund some of their own scholarships as well as list many other scholarships. The scholarships web page is located at https://www.niche.com/colleges/scholarships/

SallieMae's scholarship service is free and you need to register. This organization is well-known and can be considered one of the "nation's leading provider of saving, planning, and paying for education programs." As I say with many of the websites listed on this page, please look around SallieMae's website for more information.

Michigan State Libraries has a "Grants for Individuals" web page that is a compilation that "focuses primarily on funding opportunities for individuals, such as financial aid or scholarships for students, rather than funding for nonprofit organizations." This website has a lot of information about "Grants and Related Resources" for a variety of people and organizations.

Grants, Scholarships, and MORE presents LISTS of scholarships: