Scholarship Platform Reviews

Niche: Find College Scholarships (61/100)

Updated: December 27, 2019

Although Niche primarily focuses on ranking and reviewing colleges, companies, neighborhoods, and K-12 schools, the company also has a free scholarship search tool.

Students can search the scholarship database and filter the listings by major, state, special categories, easy-to-apply scholarships, and more. Niche offers quite a few of its own awards, such as the “$2,000 No Essay Scholarship,” the “$500 Art Scholarship,” and the “$1,000 Review Your School Scholarship,” although these comprise only a small percentage of the platform’s total funding.

As with many other platforms, students can also create a Niche profile in order to find more specific scholarship matches. Students who sign up are likely to receive communications from colleges, universities, and other companies related to higher education, although students can opt out of most data-sharing on Niche.

The Niche website is certainly modern, user-friendly, and very functional, and it offers numerous other tools related to higher education, including a college guidance section, admissions calculator, college rankings, and career help. There are a few banner ads on the site, although these are quite discreet and not particularly distracting.

Students are directed to other websites to complete their various scholarship applications, so creating a detailed Niche profile doesn’t really speed up the application process or help students impress scholarship panels. Although the scholarships on Niche are mostly listed elsewhere, as well, the platform clearly vets the listings carefully to ensure that they are genuine opportunities with nearby deadlines.

Scholly (61/100)

Updated: December 27, 2019

Known to the world from its appearance on Shark Tank, Scholly is one of the few platforms we analyzed that requires users to pay for access to its scholarship search tool ($44.99/year).

This is somewhat surprising, considering that Scholly is quite similar to several of the free platforms we looked at, as its main purpose is to provide students with a list of matching scholarship opportunities based on a detailed profile.

The process of creating a Scholly profile is fairly time consuming, as users are required to fill in all of the required information before seeing their matches. This is a particularly lengthy process because most of the information (such as current school year, intended major, and GPA) has to correspond with the options in a drop-down menu. This sometimes takes a while to load, which could be frustrating for students who simply want to view a list of scholarship opportunities. However, the upside of having such a detailed profile is better results from the scholarship matching tool.

Scholly clearly prides itself on its unique features, such as “Scholly Scores,” which ranks scholarships by relevance in order to point students towards opportunities that closely match their profile, are easy to apply for, and have minimal competition.

Scholly also touts the benefits of “Scholly Editor,” a writing tool that helps students edit and improve their scholarship essays. Students who pay for an annual Scholly subscription also have access to “Scholly Math,” an AI-powered tool that automatically finds the answers to math problems and provides detailed instructions for solving them.

Scholly proudly advertises that its impact has been “$100 million in scholarships won so far.” Although most of the scholarships on Scholly are also found on other platforms, there are occasional Scholly-sponsored awards, which are sweepstakes rather than merit-based scholarships.

The overall user experience with Scholly is generally positive, and the site is free from ads and unwanted offers. Scholly is also better than most platforms at protecting personal information, which it does not share with advertisers or third parties.

Unigo (59/100)

Updated: December 27, 2019

With around $3.6 million in scholarships, Unigo has a large pool of opportunities available to students who create a free account and complete a detailed profile. Unigo requires students to complete five pages of questions in order to access their scholarship matches.

Unigo publicizes a number of its own scholarships, which seem to be fairly straightforward to apply for. Many of these have surprisingly creative essay prompts that actually seem fun to write, such as the “Zombie Apocalypse Scholarship” and the ‘Make Me Laugh Scholarship.”

Unigo has more functionality than many scholarship search engines, and it also has a comprehensive database of information about colleges and student loans, as well as numerous articles about various aspects of student life, study skills, college prep, careers, financial literacy, and many other topics.

The Unigo platform works smoothly, and allows users to opt out of information sharing options.

Chegg (80/100)

Updated: December 27, 2019

Ranks #3

Score: 80/100

VISIT WEBSITE

Strong breadth and depth of opportunities.
Easy user experience.
Good data privacy and limited unrelated offers relative to other platforms.
Save scholarships to apply later.

Funding isn’t exclusive to platform.
Applications are off-site.

Rounding out the “Best of the Best,” Chegg Scholarships earned a score of 80 out of 100 across our Funding, Trustworthiness, and User Experience categories.

Like Sallie Mae, Chegg is essentially a database that connects students with a multitude of scholarship opportunities, most of which are advertised on multiple platforms. With scholarships worth over $1 million in total, Chegg matches students with a wealth of funding opportunities spread across hundreds of scholarships.

The list of scholarships appears to be updated on a regular basis, and there is a wide variety of scholarships that cater to students with various backgrounds. These scholarships are designed for current graduate and undergraduate students, as well as high school students working on their college applications.

Students can filter the scholarships by deadline and award amount, and they can create a saved list of scholarship opportunities in order to apply later. Helpfully, Chegg allows students to peruse a general list of scholarships without having to create a profile, although students are encouraged to make one in order to find specific scholarships that match their interests, background, education, and financial status. Creating a Chegg account is free and is a very straightforward process, and students can do this even more easily by linking their Google or Facebook profiles.

However, in contrast to Bold.org, Chegg does not appear to offer any of its own scholarships, which means that students across the country will be seeing and applying for the same scholarships on Chegg as on many other websites.

As with Sallie Mae and most other scholarship platforms, Chegg’s list of scholarships contains links to the awarding organization’s webpage, which is where students find out about what is needed to apply. This typically involves filling out personal information about age, gender, location, interests, intended field of study, and more, in addition to the required scholarship essays.

The profiles that students create on Chegg.com aren’t shared with the various scholarship panels, so students will find themselves repeating the same information on every application. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help students to stand out from the crowd when their applications are reviewed by scholarship panels. In contrast to how Bold.org simplifies the application process for its scholarships, Chegg’s functionality seems limited as it is first and foremost a database of links.

Chegg scored highly in most of the “Trustworthiness” categories, as the website is committed to keeping users’ personal information private and safeguarding their privacy.

However, during the registration process to create a Chegg profile or to sign into their Chegg account, students are likely to see advertisements for related services, such as student loans offered by Discover. Unfortunately, this decreases the platform’s overall impression of reliability and trustworthiness.

It’s also worth noting that Chegg.com is a for-profit website that offers a variety of educational tools, such as textbook rental, equation solvers, grammar checkers, flashcards, test prep, and access to online tutors. Although the scholarship section of Chegg.com is a free service, it is apparent that scholarships are not the primary focus of the website.

That being said, Chegg is certainly a modern brand that offers a wide variety of both free and subscription-based services, many of which may be useful for high school and college students. In addition to the scholarship search tool and the various academic aids, students can use Chegg to prepare for the SAT and apply for internships.

The website is very clear, straightforward, and easy to use, with faultless technical functionality, and Chegg also offers smartphone apps to improve the convenience and delivery of its many services.

ScholarshipOwl (55/100)

Updated: December 27, 2019

ScholarshipOwl is one of the few platforms we analyzed that is only available to users who pay a subscription for the service.

Somewhat misleadingly, ScholarshipOwl encourages site visitors to “register for free” and input a significant amount of personal data and information about prospective college plans before providing a partial list of “scholarship matches.” However, users can only view these matches or use ScholarshipOwl’s application service if they pay for a subscription after a 7-day free trial. Plans range from $10/month to $69/month, which is for the VIP package.

According to ScholarshipOwl’s Privacy Policy, it appears that the information inputted during the registration process can be shared with or sold to third parties, including marketing companies.

The main appeal of ScholarshipOwl is that the platform helps users apply to multiple scholarships at the same time, as well as matching users to new scholarships as they become available and automatically applying to repeat scholarships. While this may save students time, this service is not entirely unique to ScholarshipOwl, as other platforms also streamline the application process.

And although ScholarshipOwl advertises that it has “hundreds of thousands” of dollars worth of opportunities, the vast majority of these scholarships are also advertised on other platforms.