Scholarships are the best ways to pay for college fees. Scholarships are designed to help people but sometimes it’s hard to know which scholarship is a scam and which scholarship is legit. If you apply for a scholarship that is scammy then you will not get any winning amount and may miss out on the opportunity of getting a scholarship. The Scammy scholarships do not award any amount but want your private information. To avoid applying for scammy scholarships just go through this article as here we discuss Legit Scholarships, Signs that prove the scholarship is legit or scam, ways to avoid scammy scholarships, and ways to find legit scholarships. With these insights, you can save yourself and your financial details from scams.
What is a Legit Scholarship?
A legit Scholarship means that the application procedure of scholarships doesn’t ask for the application fee. The scammer scholarships ask for various unusual things like bank account numbers, credit card numbers, etc. Legit Scholarships do not need any such type of information to verify your identity. Therefore, when scholarships do not demand any unnecessary thing from you and provide you money as per your application and ability then it is considered as legal. Before applying you should check over the source of the scholarship which means who is the provider of the scholarship.
How to know if the scholarship is legit?
The legit scholarships are not for the marketing purpose and their main goal is to help students in paying their college fees. The legitimate scholarships require essays or at least a few short-answer responses. Most of the scholarships have minimum GPA requirements and require transcripts, and SAT/ACT scores for additional support. Several other points prove the scholarship is either legit or a scam. Let’s discuss the signs of legit and scammer scholarships.
Signs of a Legit Scholarship
To know whether the scholarship is legit or not. You have to consider the following points.
- Essay Requirement: If the scholarship is legit then they require you to submit an essay that includes all the necessary information about you. Sometimes students don’t have time to write an essay so they avoid applying for scholarships. It increases the chance of winning the scholarship for many other students. A legit scholarship provider spends enough time to read the essays of the applicants and then they award the scholarship to the most worthy student.
- Restricted Deadlines: A legit scholarship provider will always stick to the deadlines which means they will never change their deadline dates and never accept late applications.
- Proper Contact Details: A legit scholarship provider always mentions proper contact details so that students can easily contact them. They do not like dealing with mail only.
- Less focus on Advertising: Most of the legit scholarship providers do not advertise their offers too much. Students come to know about them from their teachers, colleges, universities, or online platforms.
- List of Previous Winners: A legit scholarship provider always releases a list of previous year winners. The best part is that with that list you can check about the winners on Google through their names whether they are real winners or not. It helps you to find out about the legit and scammer scholarship.
- Eligibility Criteria: Almost all legit scholarships have a lot of requirements and different eligibility criteria which help providers in restricting students for application. Eligibility criteria include location, affiliation, GPA, financial need, etc. It also helps students as because of more eligibility criteria, fewer students will apply and the chances of winning will increase for other students.
So, these are the points that prove the scholarship is legit. Now let’s focus on the signs of scammer scholarships.
Signs of a Scammer Scholarship
To know whether the scholarship is a scam or not. You have to focus on the following points.
- Asking for Unusual Information: If any scholarship asks you about your credit card number for your verification then it must be a scam because a legit scholarship never asks you for such information.
- Demanding a Fee: Most of the scammer scholarships charge some kind of application fee and a legit scholarship provider never charges such an amount. Sometimes students believe in it and pay the application fee because it’s too reasonable and small. You have to be aware of the fact that a legit scholarship doesn’t charge any processing or application fee.
- Claim of Affiliation: Some providers claim that they are affiliated and approved scholarship providers under the U.S. Department of Education or any such authority. You should know the fact that the Federal Government banned private businesses’ endorsement in scholarships.
- Changing Deadlines: A legit scholarship never makes changes in their deadlines but a scammer scholarship provider always works as per their hunger for fraud. They keep on changing over deadlines according to their convenience.
- Unprofessional Behaviour: Sometimes scammers make silly mistakes in their details like spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, etc. The biggest mistake they make is they don’t provide any telephone number for contacting them and try to contact them only via mail. This clearly states that the scholarship provider is fake.
- Over Advertising: Scammer scholarship providers show themselves as the best providers and in this case, they over-advertise their schemes and keep on saying that million or billion of dollars in scholarships went unclaimed last year.
- Provides Guarantee of Winning: A legitimate scholarship never guarantees that a student will surely win a scholarship and if any scholarship provider does that it means it’s a fake scholarship.
So, these are some points that prove the scholarship is a scam. You should focus on these points while applying for a scholarship.
How to find Legit Scholarships?
If you want to find a real and legitimate scholarship then you should focus on local scholarships. If you are going to apply for the national scholarship then the terms of winning the scholarship may be low because the competition for the national scholarships is very high. Therefore, you have to focus on the local scholarship first. Before applying you should check over the provider whether the scholarship provider is affiliated or not. You should consult your teachers, seniors, or experts to gain insight into scholarships.
Conclusion
To know that the scholarship is legit you have to focus on the points like the fee charges, unusual information, over advertisement, etc. You should apply for the scholarship through trusted sources after consulting with your seniors. You can use the Cappex database as well to search and apply for a legit scholarship. Cappex is a database that uses a screening process for reviewing the scholarships. After reviewing they add the scholarships to the scholarship database. In case if you apply for any scammy scholarship then you can report the scam to FTC, and NFIC and can fill an online complaint form. So, before applying you have to check all the facts and figures.