Cappex is another well-established scholarship search engine, and it has an extensive database with links to over $11 billion in total funding.
The registration process is fairly straightforward, allowing students to find relevant opportunities by expanding their profiles. However, although the Cappex site is modern and user friendly, it does contain numerous banner advertisements and frequent mentions of completely unrelated commercial products and services.
Cappex also requires users to click through a number of steps in which universities attempt to attract students’ attention before they can access the full scholarship list. Even then, the first “featured” scholarships on the list are clearly being promoted by paid advertising.
Cappex has hundreds of scholarships from legitimate organizations and companies, but this extensive amount of advertising detracts from the trustworthiness of the platform and makes it seem as if students’ personal data is likely to be shared with various universities, loan providers, and marketing companies.
Students can benefit from detailed information about various colleges and universities on the Cappex platform, which may be helpful for students who are still researching their choices. They can view college-specific funding opportunities, as well, including scholarships aimed at students who are currently attending those institutions. There is also extensive information about different majors and some helpful articles on a variety of topics.
Alongside each scholarship, Cappex provides some useful icons to quickly inform students about the likely competition for each award, and how long it will probably take to apply. Scholarships can be filtered by amount, name, and deadline, and it’s easy for students to sort them into categories like “Might Apply,” “Won,” and “Will Not Apply.”
Cappex does appear to have some of its own exclusive scholarships, but as they are all “no essay,” one-click applications, it is hard to judge whether they are legitimate opportunities or not. As with Fastweb, it can be distracting to see that many fellowships, volunteer programs, and other awards are also listed on the Cappex database, interspersed among the scholarships.
And as is the case with many platforms, students will have to follow links to scholarship websites and complete the requirements and essays listed there, rather than having the Cappex profile they created shared with multiple scholarship panels.