College fees are increasing every academic year and so are the students looking for financial assistance to pay their college fees. There are thousands of universities and welfare organizations that are helping students pay their tuition fees across the world. There are numerous ways to search for a scholarship, one of which is the use of scholarship database sites.
Scholarship database sites have greatly helped students in search of scholarships by providing arranged information about scholarship programs offered all over the world. This facility has relieved students of the hectic job of searching for a scholarship that meet their need and then reading every detail of each program before applying for it. Many of these sites also provide a service whereby you fill a questionnaire explaining your requirements and your past academic achievements, which is then processed by the site and scholarship programs that matches your requirement and that you are eligible for are recommended to you. Some of these sites also charge a nominal fee for their services. Some sites also provide you with the facility of making an online application for scholarship programs at their site.
The utility of scholarship search sites is unquestionable, yet it has its disadvantages too. Most of these search sites only search among the programs offered by different universities and colleges, and completely overlook the aid available to students from government and welfare organizations. Some of the search engines that do have such scholarship programs in their database mostly have information about programs offered by US and UK governments.
Moreover almost all of these scholarship database sites recommend scholarship programs offered in developed countries or programs offered to international students, so these database sites are of little use to students from developing countries.
Due to the reasons explained above students should not restrict themselves to these search engines. All students should make use of such engines to search for an appropriate scholarship but in addition to this they should also search by themselves the opportunities available to them from governments in their home country and welfare organizations. Students from developing countries should also contact higher education regulatory authorities in their home country because many developing countries run scholarship programs for development of their students.
Students should also consider getting grants and financial aid from organizations that offer financial aid to ethnic or religious minorities. These programs are easy to qualify for because the competition is much less compared to open scholarship programs.