Scholarship Strategy Tips

Selecting Scholarship Recipients:
Are you doing it right?

Mark Kantrowitz
Publisher, FinAid Page, Inc. (http://www.finaid.org)
Member of FastWeb Advisory Board

Many scholarship sponsors base their scholarship application forms on materials they've received from other scholarship granting organizations. Unfortunately, this can make the selection process more complicated and cumbersome than necessary.

In this article we present a set of tips for designing a set of selection criteria that will help you efficiently and effectively identify scholarship recipients.

The first step is to identify your objective. Why are you granting scholarships? What are two or three key characteristics you want to see in the scholarship recipients?

The next step is to relate your objectives to concrete selection criteria.

Try to be as concrete as possible, and to use questions with measureable answers. If your questions are too abstract, you'll find it more difficult to compare candidates.

Group the questions into related groups, such as academic, personal, extracurricular, leadership/service, artistic, athletic, and financial need. Your goal is to keep the number of such dimensions small, and to develop a methodology for assigning a score to each dimension.

Once you have established scores for each dimension, there are several different ways to combine the scores.

• One way, used by college admissions offices, is to sum the scores, and establish two thresholds on the sums. Any score below the first threshold is an automatic reject. Any score above the second threshold is an automatic admit. The candidates with scores between the two thresholds is in a gray area and needs to be examined closely. By summing the scores, you allow candidates with a low score on one dimension to balance the one fault with outstanding qualities in the other dimensions.

• Another way is to multiply the scores on each dimension. This will require excellence in all dimensions for a candidate to obtain a high overall score.

• A third way is to prioritize the dimensions, and to sort the candidates in "dictionary order", ranking them first by the first dimension, and in cases of matches by the second dimension, and so on. This works well if you have a set of primary criteria that should overwhelm any of the secondary criteria.

The overall scores can then be used to select the recipients directly, or to establish a ranking on the candidates that is used to determine the order in which they are evaluated. Be careful to be as specific as possible in your selection criteria. If your selection criteria are too loose, you will be swamped with applications.

Some sponsors have established application fees as a way to cut down on the number of applications. This is a bad idea, because it opens the door for scam artists to mimic legitimate scholarships as a way to defraud students. Charging a fee also eliminates applicants based on ability to pay, side-stepping your selection criteria. It may be tempting to cut your overhead costs in this fashion, but it does a disservice to the students who apply for the award and don't win. Many financial aid administrators and guidance counselors tell their students to never invest more than a stamp.

Try to focus on quality, not quantity. If one question will do, don't ask three. Why request four letters of recommendation, when two will work just as well? Keeping your application form short will cut your printing and mailing costs.

Essays are difficult to evaluate and tiresome to read. It may be better to constrain the length of the essay by requiring the answer to appear in a fixed amount of space on the page.

Finally, before sending your galleys to the printer, do a trial run of the form on a small set of test subjects. This is one of the best ways to catch and fix glitches in your application forms before the selection process begins.