Paying for education: Scholarships
About this video
This video explains scholarships: like grants, they are money you don't pay back, but they usually have a merit component (academic or athletic) and sometimes a need-based one too. Sal describes the application process, warns about scams that charge an application fee, and explains that scholarships come from colleges, nonprofits and corporations.
You'll be able to
- explain how scholarships are similar to and different from grants.
- spot a common scholarship scam.
- name who gives scholarships.
Key words
- Scholarship
- Money for school you don't pay back, usually based partly on achievement or merit.
- Merit-based
- Given for achievement, such as academic or athletic success.
- Need-based
- Given according to how much financial need you have.
- Application fee
- Money charged to apply; for scholarships, a big warning sign of a scam.
Transcript
- [Instructor] Let's talk a little bit about scholarships. Like grants, these are money, or this is money, that you don't have to pay back, which is a very, very good thing. So your most obvious question might be, "so how is this different than an actual grant?"
Well, as I just mentioned, in a lot of ways they are similar in that you don't have to pay it back. The way that it's different is that scholarships are usually to some degree based on some form of achievements or academic merit or athletic merit. So there's usually some, lemme just call it, there's usually some merit component to it, but it also, in some cases, will also have a need-based, need-based component.
When you think of grants, you typically think primarily need-based, and then for scholarships, it could be need-based, but then there's also a merit, and then there's some scholarships that are purely merit. If you're a great athlete, if you had achieved a lot of academic success, whatever it might be, it is on top of that.
Now, the way it works is there's usually some type of an application process. Sometimes they want you to write an essay or do something or prove something else, so keep a lookout for that. But also be worried about scams because scamsters know that people want free money, and so they might be tempted to go try to get a scholarship.
And so there are scams where people say, "hey, we have this scholarship, but you need to give an application fee in order to qualify for this scholarship." That is very seldom that people would actually charge an application fee for a scholarship. It is likely a scam, where they just collect the application fees and really don't give anyone a scholarship.
So keep a lookout for this. Now, the last question is who actually gives these scholarships? And it really is a whole bunch of groups. It could be the institution where you are going to school. They might have these scholarships just as a mechanism of financial aid to support students and also to attract students from different groups or with certain abilities.
And then there's a bunch of private organizations, nonprofits, corporations, that also provide scholarships that are either merit-based or need-based, and in many cases some combination of both.
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