Colleges With The Largest Scholarships

There are many different ways to fund your college education, each with their own pros and cons. College scholarships are one of the best options and offer great returns on your time investment, especially if you focus on colleges with the largest scholarships.

Even just a few hours spent applying for various scholarships can potentially recoup hundreds or thousands of dollars in tuition and other college expenses.

But which colleges offer the heftiest scholarships, and is it the best measure to use? This article explores these questions in more detail.

What are college scholarships and how do they work?

A college scholarship is a form of financial aid given to students for the purpose of their post-secondary education. Scholarships are often awarded on the basis of academic performance, but may also be awarded on the basis of need.

There are two main types of college scholarships. The first is provided by individual organizations. These scholarships can be used for any university, higher education institution. There are many websites where you can search for this kind of scholarships.

Other scholarships are offered directly by the university. Universities often set tuition fees, but cover those costs with scholarships. This scholarship can be quite expensive depending on the university.

Scholarships may be awarded based on need-based, merit-based, a combination of both, or based on various factors. The odds of winning a college-offered scholarship can be a factor in deciding which college you should attend.

Using Common Datasets (CDS)

School websites and financial aid departments are excellent resources for figuring out total tuition and other costs and finding available scholarships. Another resource is the Common Data Set (CDS) Initiative.

Common dataset is a document that contains a variety of standard college admissions questions, including financial information. This is a collaborative effort of several different data providers across the higher education community to standardize the information available to students and others studying universities.

What does the common dataset contain?

Although the CDS contains hundreds of questions, here are some examples of financial information included in common data sets to find the colleges with the most scholarships and financial aid offered.

• Total amount of scholarships for students
• Number of students receiving need-based and non-need-based financial assistance
• % of students with student loans
• Number of students whose financial needs were fully met through financial aid offers

A complete version of the CDS Survey can be found at the following URLs: Common dataset website.

CDS example

The good news is that nearly all public and private universities have compiled and published their answers to the CDS questions. The bad news is that there is no publicly accessible compilation of answers to his CDS questions for each university.

Instead, you’ll have to search for answers for each university. If you do a web search for the name of a particular college and “CDS” (eg “University of Cincinnati CDS” or “Harvard Common Data Set”), the first response will usually be that school’s response.

To give you an idea of ​​the information available, below are CDS responses from several schools to some of the financial aid-related questions for the 2021-22 school year.

As you can see, even this very small sample gives us a lot of information.

6 schools offering the biggest scholarships

There are several ways to determine which colleges have the most scholarships. Are you also including colleges that have high tuition and other ancillary costs and also offer a large amount of scholarship aid? Or are the biggest scholarships the ones that cover the highest percentage of the total cost? What about tuition-free schools?

All six colleges listed below offer significant scholarships and other financial aid (information based on CDS responses for the 2021-22 academic year).

Universities with a high proportion of students receiving non-need-based aid:

• Utah Tech University — 96%
• Westminster College (Pennsylvania) — 80%
• Webb Institute (New York) — 74%

Universities with a large amount of financial aid on average:

• Columbia University (New York) — $55,521
• Yale University — $52,894
• Williams College — $51,890

But remember, colleges like Columbia are also high on the list of the most expensive colleges. So, even with a lot of financial aid, you may still be paying a very high price.

Conclusion

While there are many ways to pay for college, scholarships are a great way to offset the cost of higher education. Like grants, scholarships usually don’t have to be repaid, making them a better option than student loans, which of course have to be repaid. Finding the colleges offering the largest scholarships can be difficult, but a survey of common data sets is a good place to start.

The CDS survey provides the number of students, the number of students receiving various forms of aid, and the average amount of aid received for each school or university that responded. By comparing the information of the schools you are considering, you can know how much scholarship you can get.