What’s the #1 FREE Scholarship Search Engine?

For any student (undergrad or grad) or high school senior looking for scholarships, Google can be one daunting place.
Its a jungle out there! and if you go by what “experts” say you’ll find as many myriad opinions as the number of universities and colleges that exist out there.

So we here at Private School Grants decided to do a little research of our own, and we’ll share the “expert” opinions (both human and robot) and then give you our take. But for those if us who are not familiar with such search engines – a quick intro is needed.

Essentially, scholarship search engines (the FREE ones!) allow you to search for grants and scholarships according to your preferences, needs, major, etc. Its one of the most powerful resources you can utilize. Some are more advanced than others, some are more regularly updated then others. From our standpoint (the student – always!) there’s only one thing to consider: How many can you find in the shortest amount of time that you can apply for? That’s it – that’s the qualification we want to look at.

#1 Choice of the Search Engines:
The search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc) will most often give you: Scholarships.com the reason to SEO people is obvious (their name is their keyword). To the rest of us – it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily the best, but they do have the smartest name on the block.

#1 Choice of US News & World Report:
US News and World Report is well known for ranking colleges and universities according to different criteria. So its no surprise they have a ranking on top scholarship search engines as well. They go with College Board

#1 Choice from Forbes:
Forbes – the home page of business leaders – a stellar business magazine and website well-known for its “Best of the Web” series and “Lists” such as the Forbes 400 ranks Scholarship Experts as the best scholarship search engine.

Are you ready for our choice – our pick – here it is…

#1 Choice of Private School Grants:
We’ve focused on that one thing that we believe in all along: not fancy graphics, not streamlined searching – and these are valid evaluation points – but for us its the nitty-gritty and based on that our #1 choice is Fastweb

I don’t want to get into details and waste your time about the pros and cons of each but suffice it to say that all of the above are great, excellent and free resources.

If you have the time you should regularly check up on each of them. Pick a day and assign it to a particular site, keep one that you check more often, that you find easier to use and navigate and stick with it.