Colleges and universities have dozens, maybe hundreds, of scholarships to give away!

Do you know how to search a college or university website for scholarships? Digging up scholarships from college websites has become second nature for us. But it occurred to me that many students might not know how to find those college scholarship lists buried as they can be on deep college pages.

I’m going to share some quick tips that should help you find the scholarship resources you need on any college website, including some you could be missing.

First, let’s understand the common types of scholarships a college provides:

• Institutional scholarships—target general students and are based on academic merit and/or financial need.
• Endowed scholarships are likely department specific, and target a much smaller population of students typically studying in a particular subject or pursuing a certain degree.

**An endowed scholarship is one funded by private sources, often outside alumnae or corporations, usually with fond ties to the institution or department. You’ll also see many awards that have been established in memory of a student or faculty member, also endowed scholarships.

1. Here is a step by step strategy to follow for finding institutional scholarships on a college website:

• Start at ABC College’s homepage, not the bookstore page or the football team’s page, but the main page, probably something like, www.SomeCollege.edu.
• There are some pretty standard links on this page (obviously if any links say “scholarships” that should be a no-brainer, but that situation is rare); look for “Admissions,” “financial aid,” or “financial aid and tuition.” You might be given more general categories, like “prospective students” or “current students.” Some colleges try to make it more intuitive, with links like “paying for school.” Also, many sites feature a “Quick Links” drop down menu. Here you are likely to find a standard “financial aid” link.
• From the Financial Aid main page, you will likely have a choice of links including “how to apply,” “forms and applications,” and “types of financial aid.” Usually the “types of financial aid” link is the lead-in to information on scholarships, as well as loans and work-study programs.
• Follow the “scholarships” link. Chances are good you’ll end up on a page that tells you a bit about the institutional scholarships available, those merit and need-based general scholarships, plus information on eligibility and applying.
• Often there are further links for “outside scholarships” and “endowed scholarships.” Use these to access more targeted awards.

**To sum up what we just did: you should find the general merit and need scholarships on a webpage in the Financial Aid section of the college or university website. When in doubt, always head for “financial aid.”

2. Find endowed or departmental scholarships:

There are a couple of different ways to find the department-specific scholarships on a college or university website.

From the college homepage search any ‘academics’ link, and this should lead you further to a directory of departmental schools and subjects, such as biology or anthropology. After making your selection, most likely you will be lead to the department homepage. This is where your search can get tricky: from here you will likely have two search methods to choose from:

• Direct link to scholarships
• Hunt and peck method

Department specific scholarships may be as easy to find as the “endowed scholarships” link or they may be buried in deeper department pages with little direction on how to access them directly.

Here’s an example I just picked to examine the ‘hunt and peck method’, starting at Georgetown’s homepage:

I see the words ‘academic departments’ on the main menu, so I’m headed in the right direction.

From Georgetown University’s Academic Programs page I noticed a link stating, "All academic programs A-Z". Perfect!

Anthropology was selected from the list and I arrived at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

From there I had the following tabs/links from which to choose: Home, About, Programs, Courses, Faculty, Research, and Resources. Logically, which would you choose to explore first? I chose “Resources.”

There I had to choose from even more targeted links, and I went with “For Anthropology Students,”, it seemed logical.

Finally, that led me to the Anthropology Student Resource page and a long list of departmental scholarships and fellowship programs.

See? It can get tricky and I occasionally choose incorrectly using websites of different universities.

**The trick to finding departmental or endowed scholarships: be persistent. What do I do when I’m at a dead end? Back out and try again.

Use Google to find specific pieces of a college website:

When all else fails defer to Google: open a fresh Google search page. In the search box type in a query like this: scholarships <name of department><name of school> then hit Enter or the Search button. For example, I queried:

scholarships anthropology georgetown university

First search result: the GU Anthro department page (same page I described above where I clicked on the Resources link).

**Tip: Large universities house related departments inside colleges. The “College of Arts and Humanities,” for instance, will likely have a variety of departments like English and Sociology, so you might have to dig through a few academic layers to really get to the place where you want to be. If you get confused: Google the department name and university, simple as that.

Scenario: What If Every Student Went Directly to College, What Then?

The rhetoric is that education is important, but is our economy really prepared for the scenario in which every student does choose to attend a four-year college? First responses are “Sure, no problem.” But if you take up a strong cup of coffee and sit down with some friends to jaw over it, it’s likely you’ll dig up some pretty big reasons why this scenario could backfire, economically.

If everyone suddenly chose to go to a four-year college and earn a degree—Utopian at best, but a mind-bending what-if….

• Would we lose employees in the McDonald’s down the street?
• Would Ford and Chrysler be forced to move operations to countries where there was still a manufacturing work force?
• Would there be builders to make houses with hammers and nails?
• Would asphalt be laid for new super highways?
• Would there be someone to tow your car when it breaks down?

Let’s ease up just a bit on this farfetched concept and try this one: What if every graduating high school student next year entered college right out of high school; just one class of graduating seniors? (Again, Utopian because as rumpled as secondary schools are, too many seniors fail to graduate or be adequately prepared to enroll in college). Right now there is a population that does, in fact, graduate and go directly to school, but there is also a population that divides work with school, and a population that enters the work force. Without the population of high school students that foregoes college to enter the work force, how many jobs would go unfilled?

Get a Technical or Trade Education–Millions of Skilled Jobs to Fill

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2012 there will be an upsetting shortage of laborers in a number of key sectors: healthcare, IT, and manufacturing and production, are among them. The reasons are multi-pronged. Since education has re-routed students to college, as opposed to trades, there are fewer and fewer skilled laborers entering the work force. By 2012 more workers in these sectors will retire, leaving jobs unfilled.

Doesn’t sound so competitive, does it?

Since jobs will be unfilled because students are heading to college or dropping out of high school—leaving them totally unprepared for anything but unskilled jobs—then it’s necessary to see the numbers associated. The BLS reports that, between new job creations and retiring workers, over 56 million new and existing jobs will possibly sit vacant! Some of these will require two or four-year degrees, but plenty of them only require career or “on-the-job” training. Are we encouraging well qualified technical students? Is anyone in education brave enough to counsel students, perhaps underachieving in academics, to consider a skilled and well-paying trade as opposed to the alternative—dropping out?

Scholarships Available for Trade/Professional Programs

There has been some recent excitement in some types of career programs: cosmetology (notice increasing number of Aveda Institutes, for example), massage therapy (a high-demand skill), and HVAC, which goes hand in hand with the construction industry. All of these professional trades require a term of specialized schooling and increasing numbers of sources are funding scholarships and grants for interested students.

Lack of Vocational Choices

Once upon a time vocational schools were innately partnered with many public high schools. Students with a drive for auto mechanics, agriculture, and carpentry and construction could spend part of their high school careers learning a trade—a well-paying one, at that. In the 90s, though, in Education’s zeal to see every student remade into a robotic scholar, vocational schools were severed from the public systems and most are defunct, non-existent.

Political Waffling

In 2006, President Bush signed back into action the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act. The act is designed to allow for increased support for technical and vocational education programs. Currently there is some buzz on the Presidential campaign trail that favors cutting budget spending on technical education. So what’s it going to be?

Education’s One-Track Mind

But as much as one might try to force a square peg into a round hole, there are some students failing out of school simply because they are not the next great academicians. Twenty years ago, he or she had the option to pursue farming or auto repair or welding or computer repair and networking versus so called college prep, but most have no such choice. A growing chorus of career counselors and educators is brave enough at least to suggest we explore steering some students into trade schools versus four-year liberal arts colleges, inspire them to success as opposed to failure. In fact, in surveys, some high school drop-outs cite “boredom” and lack of challenge as significant factors in their decisions to part ways with academia.

Maybe if some of these students had had options for careers, they might have felt less pressure to vacate a one-track system.

In some cases students may have options for scholarship funds to vocational schools—like the state of Kansas Vocational Scholarship—but without the proper guidance in high school many will not likely find these sources on their own.

The New Innovators—Trade and Technical Students Will Drive Economic Growth

If innovation and entrepreneurship will be key to worker success in the future, as many predict, then students with the hutzpah to step off the beaten path and machete a pathway to a vocational or technical career will be the most successful among the innovators and entrepreneurs. God knows they will have to be their own best advocates—no one else is at the helm.