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Scholarships / Honest math

Which scholarships are actually worth your time?

Every other site shows you a list. We show you the math. Average award × your win probability ÷ hours required = what your time is actually worth. Set your time budget — we rank the 100 curated scholarships by expected value per hour.

Heads up: these are estimates, not guarantees. Win rates come from published applicant counts where we have them and from our own research where we don't. Your actual chance depends on your fit. Confidence labels tell you how much to trust each number.

How much time can you give this?

Your shortlist

11 scholarships fit your a month.

If you apply to all of them well, your estimated expected value is $263K across 29 hours of work. That's $9.1K per hour on average — orders of magnitude better than minimum wage. (And unlike wage work, the upside outcomes are huge.)

101 more scholarships that didn't fit in your budget

These either need more time than you said you have, or got filtered by your confidence / ROI settings. Bump your time budget up to see them included automatically.

A word on what these numbers actually mean

Expected value (EV) per hour is a forecasting tool, not a promise. A scholarship with $1,500/hr EV doesn't pay you $1,500 for an hour of work — it means if you ran this scenario a hundred times, the average outcome would be in that range. Most kids don't win the big ones; the few who do win enough to make the average pay off.

That said, EV/hr is the right comparison metric. A $50,000 award at 0.5% win rate ($250 EV) is genuinely better than a $5,000 award at 1% win rate ($50 EV) if both take the same hours. The math tells you which essays to write first.

What we adjusted for: applicant pool size where published; selectivity stage where multi-round (e.g. Coca-Cola's three rounds); local-pool dynamics for awards that distribute by chapter (RMHC, Soroptimist, Marine Corps). What we didn't adjust for: your specific fit (a STEM-research kid has way better odds at Regeneron than the headline rate). For that, do the profile match instead — it ranks by fit, not raw expected value.

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KidToCollege is free to use and editorially independent. Data sourced from public records including IPEDS, Common Data Sets, College Board and FAFSA.gov. Always verify deadlines and requirements directly with institutions. Not a guarantee of admission or financial aid.