Panning for School Gold - Internet/Web/Online Service Information - Brief Article

Industry Standard, The, Nov 27, 2000 by Gayle Horwitz

Before signing off on that second mortgage to pay for your kid's college tuition, you and your high schooler should spend an evening with one of the Web's scholarship search sites. Billions of dollars are available, and students don't have to be valedictorians to cash in. Thousands of award-givers honor everything from community service to smartly written essays to top-notch bowling skills.

We road-tested some of the top sites with our own fictional high school senior, Dottie Com. An aspiring lawyer who enjoys tennis and art, we made Cleveland-native Dottie a B student of Italian descent. We plugged her personal info into several sites and got wildly varying results. In most instances, less was more: Some sites returned long lists of scholarships that didn't match Dottie's location or interests. Below, we tally the best sites and the worst, their strengths and weaknesses, and the number of scholarships relevant to Dottie that each site found.