Scholarship Resources for Counselors

We understand that counselors and community based youth leaders may be swamped with the day-to-day details of many activities relating to advising students, so you may not have time to actively research and post scholarship opportunities for students or to thoroughly explain the process to each student in your school or youth group. You may also not have time to motivate your students to pursue scholarships so they can realize their college dreams without multiple loans. That’s where we come in. We have designed this area of our site to include scholarship resources for counselors and to include college financial aid resources for adult youth leaders, advisors and youth programs.

With this web site, you can get more information about specific activities for counselors and youth leaders to help students achieve scholarship success. Visit 10 Ways to Improve Student Success at Winning Scholarships for more suggestions and scholarship resources for counselors. You can also direct your students to sections on this site to help them in many areas:

For example, high school seniors should visit the Scholarship Timeline to learn how to organize their time and resources to apply for the maximum amount of scholarships and financial aid.
Once they are comfortable with the timeline, students should learn about Scholarship Myths and Scams.
At any time, if students need a little motivation to get started or even to keep working on the scholarship process, they should visit the Success Stories section.
To get a quick list of scholarships for which they may be eligible, your students should use the Free Scholarship Search section to visit computerized scholarship search web sites. Although the computerized search engines will give them a great jump start, remind them to also search for local, regional, and smaller scholarships that may not be on the Web. The most successful students use a combination of the Internet, books, and local research to create a personal scholarship application list.
Refer students to the Scholarship Help section to visit specific scholarship programs for high school students, college students, minority students and others. For example, high school students should visit the high school section. High school students who are minorities should visit both the high school and the minority section. Please note that these sections give examples and useful resources to help begin the scholarship research. Students should not rely upon them as their sole source of research. There may be many more scholarships available to them than those listed on this site. In fact, you may find even more programs listed in Winning Scholarships for College.

Students and parents should also visit the Books & Resources section to find books and resources they should keep handy as they start preparing applications for scholarships.
Send students and parents to the Scholarship Tips section to learn common mistakes made when applying for scholarships.
Tell your students to read the FAQ’s on our site to see common questions and their answers. Some of the answers may be helpful as they embark on their scholarship quest.
Encourage students and parents to sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Facebook to learn about upcoming workshops in their area. The Scholarship Workshop presentation is designed to be informative about the entire process but also motivational to help students and parents get started and get finished!

And finally, if you have parents calling or e-mailing about college financing, send them to the Parents area of our site. Through this section and other areas of our site, parents can get information about Ragins’ books such as Winning Scholarships for College and College Survival & Success Skills 101, link to dozens of financial aid and college related web sites including actual scholarship programs; learn about scholarship scams; estimate the money needed to pay for college at private and public universities; read about related books on scholarships, college, and financial aid; get more information about sponsoring or attending The Scholarship Workshop presentation; and find out how to qualify for the Ragins/Braswell National Scholarship sponsored annually by Marianne Ragins. Parents can also register online to receive free copies of Marianne Ragins’ books offered periodically.