How To Protect Students From Scholarship Scams 1 Your Presenters - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

How To Protect Students From Scholarship Scams

Your Presenters

Sean Geddis

Regional Director

Jacob Brooks

Solutions Consultant

Today’s Agenda

✛ The role scholarships play in funding students’

education

✛ Problems with scholarship management & external

scholarships

✛ Vetting external scholarships to prevent scams ✛ ScholarshipUniverse demonstration ✛ Questions & Answers

The Role Of Scholarships In Students’ Education 1

It’s All About Access

✛ 75% of students have unmet need ✛ Federal aid dollars aren’t keeping up with the rising costs

• f higher education

✛ Students need to supplement their education with

additional money

✛ Scholarships are crucial to closing funding gaps ✛ Students expect an easy, mobile scholarship experience

Scholarships Play a Big Role

How much importance does your school place on scholarships? $500 65% 58%

the amount of scholarship that can influence where a student enrolls. the # of students who want help finding scholarships

• f schools lack automated

scholarship mgt or don’t know what they have.

"As a student for the first time applying, having never applied for a scholarship before, it was difficult to understand what they were asking for."

"It's very frustrating to not be able to find anything, especially when you're scrolling through thousands and thousands of scholarships and you have to click on every. Single. One."

"There were a lot out there, but not a lot that applied to me.”

2 Problems With Scholarship Management & External Scholarships

Scholarship Management Today

Dangers Of External Scholarships

Scholarship Red Flags

✛ Fees associated with an application ✛ Offers a ‘guaranteed win’ ✛ Asks for banking or personal identifiers like SSN or passport info ✛ Related to controlled substances, vaping, or smoking

Scam Example: Vaping

How We Prevent Scholarship Scams 3

20%

Scholarship Scams

“There are definitely some things that are a ‘hard no’ for us. For example, you’ll never see scholarships in our system that have fees associated with an application, scholarships that offer a ‘guaranteed win,’ or that ask for banking or personal identifiers like social security number or passport information.”

The Scholarship Vetting Process

Initial Vetting

Learn about scholarship provider, the application, and any promotional materials. Look for red flags—associated fees, guaranteed win, PII request.

Detailed Vetting

Searches to identify inconsistencies like: grammatical errors, unprofessional presentation, invalid contact info, requirements for social sharing.

Annual Review

If a scholarship passes the vetting process, it is available in the ScholarshipUniverse database. It will be reviewed annually to ensure it still meets our standards.

1 2 3

Scholarship Vetting Checklist

Scholarship Vetting Checklist

*If you check three or more criteria, the scholarship is considered illegitimate

Criteria Checkbox

Blog site Grammatical inconsistencies or unprofessional language Requires sharing on social media for ‘likes’ Invalid or out-of-country phone number or email No previous winners Requires applicants to come up with solutions to a hypothetical legal or business scenario

• r create a new product that otherwise would be considered intellectual property

No contact information URL does not match company name (search WHOis.net) Wire transfer to student Requires student to send detailed financial or tax information to an unsecured email Address given does not match with business

One Scholarship Collection

✛ One source for

institutional and external scholarships

✛ Fully vetted and

maintained external scholarships

✛ All indexed in the

matching engine

One Scholarship Collection

DEMO Ready To Make It All Easier?

The Only Student Financial Services Platform

ScholarshipUniverse Customers

Questions?

Thank You!

APPENDIX

No One is Getting What They Need

Students

✛ Students can’t find scholarships to pay for school ✛ Fewer students use the institutional funds you have ✛ External scholarship opportunities are a black hole ✛ Students need more money to stay in school ✛ Students take on higher debt

Schools

✛ Decreased college accessibiity ✛ Lower scholarship fund utilization ✛ Dependence on institutional funding ✛ Lower student retention ✛ Higher student borrowing

= = = = =

Committee management enables institutions to spread applications across reviewers for fair and efficient, paperless review. SmartRank uses configurable ranking rules defined by each committee to automatically rank applicants. Easy integration with CL Connect simplifies integration with SIS and advancement systems.

Streamline Scholarship Awarding

Configurable settings and permissions let you decide what reviewers see and prevent unintentional bias in decisions. Multiple rounds of review are automated so committees can spend more time reviewing and less time coordinating. Blind- & Double-Blind Review capabilities manage anonymity and access to information for committee members.

Meet ScholarshipUniverse

✛ Increase college accessibility by closing student funding gaps ✛ Improve scholarship fund utilization with better visibility and management ✛ Bring in outside funds with vetted external scholarship database ✛ Retain more students with ongoing scholarship funding options ✛ Reduce student borrowing with less dependence on loans

Complete Scholarship Management

Adaptive Matching Engine

Coca-Cola First Generation Scholarship

P

✛ Adaptive matching

engine learns from student’s answers

✛ Interviews students by

asking questions that change based on each answer

✛ Identifies highly

relevant scholarship matches

Complete Scholarship Management

MATCH APPLY

✛

Digital, mobile scholarship management keeps students engaged

✛

One source for institutional and vetted external scholarships gives students greater funding opportunities

✛

Adaptive matching engine guides each student to highly relevant scholarships

✛

Student cockpit allows students to manage scholarship opportunities from a single portal

✛

Automated alerts inform students when new matches are found

Complete Scholarship Management

REVIEW AWARD

✛

Flexible workflow simplifies scholarship management across colleges, departments, and foundations

✛

Efficient, paperless review enables seamless application review by multiple people across campus

✛

Configurable ranking rules can be defined by each committee to automatically rank applications

✛

Automated alerts and follow-up communications keep students and staff on-task

✛

SIS integration utilizes student data throughout the scholarship process to save time and ensure accuracy

The University of Arizona

70% of UA Students Use ScholarshipUniverse, Borrowing Less

✛ Increased accessibility with centralized scholarship management for 1,400 institutional and 3,500 external scholarships ✛ Improved scholarship fund utilization with streamlined management of funds and scholarship matching for students ✛ Brought in $6M in external funding to UA students through vetted external scholarship database ✛ Improved student retention by alerting students to new, relevant scholarships (20,000+ daily views during peak season) ✛ Reduced student borrowing by making scholarship management easy, mobile, and personalized

“We improved accessibility to education, reduced the amount some UA students owed, and provided the best student experience.”