Why I Charge For The Full Scholarship List

Why I charge for the Full Scholarship List … I didn’t plan on writing a post about this, but lately I have felt like I needed to.

If you have read my About Me page, you already know that I am the mother of three girls – two successfully sent off to college and one in high school.  I have a great full-time career as an IT Manager.  My Kid’s College Choice is my hobby or maybe I should call it a “side project”.  I didn’t start a website to make money off of it.

So then, why do I charge for the Full Scholarship List?

I saw a need out there – A way for students and parents to easily search for the top institutional merit scholarships (scholarships offered directly by the colleges). I spent hundreds of hours putting the Full Scholarship List together to list full-ride and full-tuition scholarships offered by colleges around the country.  And I continue to spend a lot of hours twice a year when I update the list.  If I do a full re-examination of the list, like I am in the middle of now (to be released December 2016), to update everything on the spreadsheet and check for other scholarships that I may have missed, it is at least a one-hundred-hour project that takes me 3-4 months of nights and weekends.

It takes a certain amount of money every year to keep a website up and running and updated.  I originally just wanted the website to be self-sustaining.  But I was also looking for a way to give back to my community and I thought it would be great to be able to offer a college scholarship.

I have used the profits the last 2 years to fund a scholarship at our local high school.  I ask any of our high school seniors who are interested to submit an application with an essay on “What made you select the college you have selected?  Or, if you haven’t selected a college yet, how will you decide where to go?”  It has been very rewarding to award my own scholarship at our high school’s senior awards night.

There are a few other lists of institutional merit scholarships available online for free, but I haven’t found any that are anywhere near as complete or up to date as mine.

My list is a convenience product.  It is designed to save other parents many hours of searching for the best scholarships offered by colleges around the country.

Not everyone will be comfortable paying for a convenience product like this, an “information” product.  But I know this – If a list like the Full Scholarship List had been available when my oldest daughter was looking at colleges, I would have gladly paid for it to see if there were opportunities for her to save $100,000 or more on college tuition through institutional merit scholarships.