Scholarships

More Colleges, Universities Join Scholarship Platform to Fund Good Students

• By Sri Ravipati
• 05/17/17

An online fundraising platform that has helped high schoolers raise more than $1 billion in scholarships for college is growing its community of academic institution partners. The University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Washington University in St. Louis, Harvey Mudd College and Grinnell College are all part of the newest cohort of campuses to join Raise.me.

The platform rewards good students for their hard work: Starting from grade 9, students can input their achievements (class grades, clubs, sports, etc.) to earn “micro-scholarships” from colleges on Raise.me. Different academic institutions award different amounts for the same achievement. So, U Penn could reward a student $150 for earning an “A” in algebra, while Grinnell could offer $100, for example. Micro-scholarships typically range from $100 to $3,000 and can be redeemed once a student is admitted by a partner college.

More than 700,000 students, or one in every two students attending high schools across the United States, have used the platform to raise money for college, a recent company blog post states. The average Raise.me user receives about $20,000 from partner colleges.

Raise.me launched nationally in the fall of 2014. The company says it focuses on boosting access to higher education, especially for low-income and first-generation students. To learn more about how micro-scholarships work, watch the video below.