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Unclaimed Scholarships

Are you looking for a way to pay for your college education? Have you heard that millions of dollars in unknown unclaimed scholarships are available to you? There isn’t really unclaimed college scholarships sitting around for anyone to claim – but there are unclaimed scholarship opportunities you really need to be aware of because there are lots of them. Some scholarship sponsors will actually not award a scholarship on a particular year simply because there wasn’t enough applicants who applied and they didn’t even come close to matching up to their scholarship criteria. This tells you that you should apply to all unknown scholarships you can apply to even if your close to the qualifying criteria for a particular scholarship.

The first thing that you need to know is that while each scholarship has its requirements that must be met for eligibility, the majority of scholarships that are available do not require you to be a genius or a saint. If you have average grades, and you’ve lived an average life – meaning that you do not have numerous accomplishments or you haven’t done much civic work – you are still eligible for hundreds of different scholarships.

With that said, the fact concerning unclaimed scholarships is that most scholarship awards actually are claimed. Few go unclaimed, however there are many unclaimed college scholarships that are actually not awarded each year simply because there were no suitable applicants – or there were no applicants at all. These sometimes are referred to as unclaimed scholarships. A student who would have been close to the criteria might have picked up an easy scholarship if they’d applied!

Often, this type of unclaimed scholarship is unclaimed because the amount of the award was very small – and future college students simply went after the larger awards. This is why it is so important not to overlook any obscure scholarships that you may be eligible for, regardless of the award amount.

Make sure that you check out information concerning weird scholarships, as you very well may be eligible for several of those awards, and fewer people apply for those awards because you must have a unique and rare talent to apply and win. Check out local scholarship opportunities, state opportunities, national opportunities, and of course industry specific opportunities. Don’t overlook civic organizations that have scholarship opportunities, including clubs that you belong to, that your parents belong to, or that your grandparents belong to.

In reality, almost all college scholarships have many more applicants than available funds that will be doled out. The few college scholarships that do go unclaimed can’t be claimed because of restrictive selection criteria. For example, the Zolp scholarship is available only for students at Loyola University of Chicago born with the last name of Zolp. The name must appear on their birth certificate, and no, you cannot change your name to qualify for the award.

If you are looking for unclaimed scholarships that exist because a student won the award, and then didn’t attend school, or dropped out of school, you may save time by realizing that in most cases, the award will immediately be given to someone else who already applied for the scholarship and did not win it – but came close – or the funds will revert back to the scholarship fund, and will not be awarded again until the following application period.

There is one form of financial aid that does go unclaimed every year, and that’s the Federal Pell Grant. This is a government grant  for need based students given out when students fill out their FAFSA. According to Edvisors, about (3) million students in 2013-14 who did not file the FAFSA, would have qualified for a Federal Pell Grant. That’s just a few years ago! With college often taking more than four years, many of those students who didn’t file are likely still in school. Of them, 1.3 million would have qualified for the maximum Federal Pell Grant allowed. Those qualified students could have received a maximum amount of $5,645 in Pell Grant awards in the 2013-2014 application cycle. You can ask now, how much money will be left on the table in 2018?

Be very skeptical of websites and other advertisements that offer to get you information on millions of dollars of unclaimed scholarships for a fee. The information that they deliver to you will not be worth the paper that it is printed on, and mostly you will just receive information that you can get anywhere for free, in terms of how to tap various sources for scholarship funds. Purchasing such information is a waste of your time and money.

Understand that you must work to get scholarships for college, and this includes unclaimed scholarships. No matter what scholarships you might receive, filling out the FAFSA annually should be at the top of your priority list. Nobody is just going to hand you money for college because it was lying around unused. The best way to get the funds that you need, is to apply for every scholarship that you are eligible for (time permitting), and realize going into it that this takes a great deal of time and effort on your part. This is the real meaning of finding unclaimed scholarships!

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