Joshua and Mary Foundation: Resources

FREE SCHOLARSHIP SEARCH SITES

FastWeb Scholarship Search
The FastWeb Scholarship Search is the largest, most accurate and most popular free scholarship search site, with more than 25 million registered users. It is also the most frequently updated and provides automatic email notification of new scholarships that match the student's profile. The FastWeb Scholarship Search was the first scholarship database available for free on the web and is the most innovative and student-focused of all the scholarship search sites.

College Board's FUND FINDER
The College Board's FUND FINDER scholarship database lists scholarships and other types of financial aid programs from 3,300 national, state, public and private sources. The database is updated annually.

SRN Express
SRN Express is a free web version of the Scholarship Resource Network (SRN) database. The SRN database focuses on private-sector, non-need-based aid, and includes information about awards from more than 1,500 organizations. The database is updated annually.

Princeton Review
Princeton Review offers a free scholarship search to encourage students to visit their web site. Their scholarship database includes information from several thousand sponsors.

Scholarships.com LLC
The Scholarships.com database has good coverage of awards and a fairly precise match, but some of the scholarship entries in the Scholarships.com database appear to contain old information.

Other Scholarship Search Sites

Peterson's Award Database
The Peterson's scholarship search lists awards from about 2,000 sponsors. This is the same database used to update Peterson's Scholarships, Grants and Prizes book. The web site was a little slow and the match precision very low, forcing one to dig through a lot of irrelevant awards. Otherwise the coverage of available awards was very good.

NextStudent
NextStudent offers a free scholarship search as a loss leader to attract students to their student loan products and services. Their scholarship search is based on the scholarship database formerly known as Scholarships101. The search results lists each named award from the same award program separately, leading to a large number of matches that correspond to a single application form.

BrokeScholar
The BrokeScholar scholarship database appears to overlap with the Peterson's scholarship database and may include a licensed subset of that database. The award listings have minimal information, making it difficult to tell whether the student actually matches the scholarship's eligibility requirements. The number of matches was also very low, suggesting either a small database or too tight of a scholarship matching process.

Wintergreen/Orchard House Scholarship Database

Most other sites that offer a free scholarship search do not compile their own database, like the sites listed above do, but instead license the Wintergreen/Orchard House (WOH) scholarship database. Although the WOH database is updated quarterly, most of the sites that license it update their copy only once a year. Most of the sites also implement their own engine for searching the database, with varying degrees of tightness in the match. Most offer a very loose match, presumably because it means they initially can claim to provide more matching awards, even if those awards don't really match the student's profile. The WOH database lists awards from 1,924 sponsors.

Some of the more well-known sites that offer the WOH database include CollegeNET MACH25 and CollegeView. Note that the CollegeNet MACH25 interface to the WOH database is more a browsing interface than a true search engine. As such, most students will not find it helpful in quickly identifying the awards for which they qualify. CollegeView, on the other hand, offers a profile-based scholarship search in addition to the CollegeView scholarship directory.

More Specialized Scholarship Databases

In addition to the scholarship databases listed above, there are also several other free scholarship databases listed on FinAid. These databases are smaller, but also more tightly focused. The list of Major-Specific Databases provides information for specific majors or career interests, such as art, computer science, journalism, or nursing. FinAid also provides pages describing scholarships and other forms of aid available.

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