Updated: August 26th 2002

It used to be that most financial aid was awarded based on need. The college deans then referred to the admissions process as "need-blind admissions" -- that is, they accepted or denied students without knowing their financial status. Now, with the cost of college up and soaring, most colleges can no longer afford to accept or deny without knowing the paying ability of the student. Thus, your admissions chances can increase if you are able to win scholarship money.

As of now, the few colleges that truly have need-blind admissions are Amherst, Barnard,
Bates, Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Bucknell, Colby, Colgate, Columbia, Connecticut College, Dartmouth, Denison, Georgetown, Harvard, Haverford, MIT, Middlebury, Mount Holyoke, Notre Dame, Parsons, Penn, Princeton, Reed, St. John's (MD and NM), Sarah Lawrence, Stanford, Trinity, Tufts, Union, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and Yale. But even with these colleges, the more money you can win via scholarships, the more appealing your application will be.

It is essential that you begin your scholarship search at least one year before your first semester of college begins. Junior year is the ideal time to kick-start your search. Since scholarships are free money, competition for them is fierce and you don't want to be left behind.

In my opinion, the most effective way to find scholarships is through reputable paid scholarship search services. Now you might be thinking why I would recommend that you pay money for a scholarship search when there are plenty of "free" searches on the net. The problem I have with "free" searches is that they don't offer accurate and up-to-date information, nor do they produce search results that are completely filtered and targeted to match your unique credentials. You could end up wasting a lot of time applying for outdated scholarships and miss out on others that are lucrative. On the other hand, paid searches charge a fee to pay financial aid experts to continuously monitor the accuracy of their scholarship databases and to maintain search technology that is far superior to that of the "free" searches.

Scholarship guides are also ineffective for scholarship searches. There are approximately 200 new scholarships created each day. As such, scholarship guides are outdated the moment they are written. In addition, popular scholarship books such as Peterson's are read by millions of students worldwide. Once a scholarship is listed in Peterson's, it can expect a couple of thousand applications. Newer scholarships that are made available after Peterson's is published usually go unnoticed, unless you use a good paid search service.

The scholarship search service that I use for my students is provided by Scholarship Experts. I've found that they offer the best quality of scholarship data, which helps my students to successfully find scholarships and save a lot of time in the process. They also have the largest scholarship database which totals $15 billion. Their service is reasonably priced at $50 for one year of service. You can find more info at ScholarshipExperts.com. Kaplan also provides a quality scholarship search service for about the same price. To get more details click here. Whichever search service you use, it's always safe to stick with those provided by brand-name companies.

If you have questions for Wilson you can send them to wilson@liqwidmindz.com and we will forward them to him.

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