Paying college with scholarships isn’t as simple as it sounds.
- What are College Scholarships?
- What are the Scholarship Types?
- How do students apply for scholarships?
- When can students apply for portable scholarships?
- How long do scholarships last?
- How do students receive the scholarship money?
- What can you spend scholarship money on?
Let’s start with the definition, scholarships are simply free money for students to spend on their education. This basic definition includes scholarships awarded for pre-schools, dance classes, camps, and, of course, colleges. When you start asking what are scholarships in terms of paying for college, things don’t seem as simple any more. Now you have athletic scholarships, academic scholarships, and other various merit scholarships. And scholarships are just one kind of financial aid available for college so you probably need to have some understanding of how it differs from grants, loans, and work-study. However, even as you wade through various definitions, essentially a scholarship is free money for students to spend on their education.
(Skip to the end of the post to see the list of all 
(Skip to the end to see the list of 248 colleges that take a 3.0 GPA or less.) You can go to a four-year college with less than a 3.0 GPA. There are a number of colleges that are open admissions meaning that they will admit anyone who meets their minimum standards. This can mean just having passed specific classes in high school or meet minimum scores on selected placement tests. There are also colleges that admit students with less than a 3.0 GPA as part of their regular admissions process.
(I’ve updated the number of community colleges with dorms with data available from IPEDS in March, 2023.) As families recoil in horror contemplating the price tag of four years of college, some start to look more closely at all of the available options, including community colleges with dorms. Since community colleges are offering more traditional college amenities such as dorms, honor programs, sports, and student activities, they are becoming a more attractive way for families to seriously cut their college expenses.
At the end of my son’s last high school summer baseball season, I was struck by the number of players who had graduated and didn’t know yet where they were going to attend college. I heard a lot of talk from parents about “maybe 
