Scholarships
If you want to be shocked, check out this statistic reported by both Forbes and Sofi: around $100 million in scholarships go unclaimed each year. What?! Part of the reason is that there are so many scholarships out there it can be daunting to sift through all of them to find the one for which a student may qualify.
Folks with the best of intentions create a scholarship fund to, for example, memorialize a loved one. And perhaps that loved one had an affinity for collecting rocks and so to further honor that loved one, the scholarship is for a student who intends to major in geology. It sounds like a wonderful way to honor the memory of that individual, but it eliminates a lot of potential scholarship applicants.
Our approach to scholarships is somewhat “backwards”, in the best sense of the word. Rather than having students apply for our scholarship, we have a process through which we identify students and OFFER THEM a scholarship. We identify the student by actually going into the classroom and getting to know the students and their teachers. Our scholarship follows the student all the way to the completion of their degree program. And we stay in contact with the student while they are in school to do whatever we can to help them achieve their educational goals.