Scholar Box Helps Students Find Local College Scholarships

HomePlanUncategorizedScholar Box Helps Students Find Local College ScholarshipsThis page may contain affiliate links.Nov 17, 2014Tool Review is a new feature. In the past 18 months, weve noticed a mini explosion in the number of new apps, websites, and resources that have been developed to help students, parents, and counselors through the college planning process. Unfortunately, the people who can make best use of these tools dont always know they are available. So from time to time, well be bringing you a new tool and letting you know if its worth adding it to your tool box. Scholarship Service Finds Students Money and Saves Counselors Time Our caps (graduation caps) go off to Scholar Box and their founding team. Started in 2012, Scholar Boxs original mission was to develop a tool for school counselors who were manually dealing with communicating local scholarships to students. Today, counselors and students benefit from Scholar Boxs tools. Scholarship Tool Makes Counselors More Efficient As anyone in the college scholarship field will tell you, finding local scholarships can be very rewarding. Local businesses and  organizations want to help students succeed and theres usually a smaller pool of applicants for these scholarships compared to national  ones. The high school guidance departments are a good source for finding out about local scholarships, but they may not be the best at  handling the paperwork and communicating to students everything thats available. Scholar Box solves this problem by creating an  online list of all scholarships a school knows about, so its easy to keep track of the information and theres one source for students to  look at. Counselors just add the url of the scholarship and Scholar Box collects the scholarship name, due date, award amount and eligibility requirements and keeps the information updated. Students Reap The Benefits Students create their own accounts, answer a few questions, and get a list of their schools scholarships they qualify for. Student information is protected, not sold to third parties and the service is ad free. Scholar Box helps students keep track of scholarships they have viewed, applied for, and ones theyve chosen to ignore. Scholarships are rated by competitiveness and amount of time needed to complete based on the information required. Students can go directly to the scholarships website to apply. Heres Why We Like It Its win-win for counselors and students. Both counselors and students save time and are more organized. Best of all, students have a reliable, online source to review their schools scholarships and keep track of progress. Its free for students and schools. There is no charge for schools to work with Scholar Box and there is no fee for students to have an account that accesses their schools scholarships. Scholar Box finds local company sponsorships to cover their costs of working with schools. For students, the account is free except if they choose to upgrade, which would allow them to qualify for scholarships from other schools. The cost to upgrade is $99, but we were told Scholar Box will refund that fee if students do not receive any scholarships. Its local and genuine. Scholar Box wants to deal with local scholarships, rather than use their platform to promote the same scholarships that can be found on major scholarship search engines. Theres One Catch.. Unfortunately up till now, Scholar Box has only worked with schools in Utah. They are starting to expand to other states, but wont be of value to you until they come to your area. You can help if you are a counselor and are interested in using Scholar Boxs service contact James Smyth at [emailprotected] If you are a parent let your school know about Scholar Box. After all its free and will help students more easily find money from local sources.    Road2College Debbie Schwartz is former financial services executive and founder of Road2College and the Paying For College 101 Facebook group. She's dedicated to providing families with trustworthy information about college admissions and paying for college. With data, tools and access to experts she's helping families become educated consumers of higher ed. View all posts CATEGORIES PlanToolsUncategorized TAGS Guidance CounselorScholarshipsNEWER POSTNew SAT For 2016OLDER POSTRegular Decision Deadlines Extended