Micro-Scholarships: Raise.Me Makes Getting Into College That Much Easier
Scholarships for colleges aren’t always the first thing that high-school students think about. With time in high school including many personal challenges besides good grades and getting scholarships being a challenge for a lot of lower-income students, a lot of great young people miss out on the opportunity for a great college education. Raise.Me is a startup that wants to give students a better challenge of getting scholarships to attend great colleges and universities – using ‘micro-scholarships’. By early 2015, colleges have made available $250 million in micro-scholarships at Raise.Me!
While the US offers literally billions of dollars for scholarships and grants to students, these grants are offered during the end of high school when students have already made up their minds on what college they’d like to attend. Only at the very end do students get rewarded for their effort in high school, which is far too late to make any meaningful difference if they want a take a different direction.
Raise.Me is different because it lets high school students earn micro-scholarships as early as the 9th grade, by directly translating their effort into money for their college education. Whether they improve their grades or maybe volunteer in their community, students earn micro-scholarships that will give them an instant insight into how to impact their own future.
While students obviously benefit by receiving financial rewards that they can clearly see, colleges benefit by attracting the most active and qualified applicants. As Raise.Me CEO and co-founder Preston Silverman has stated: the University of Rochester, for example, enables students to earn up to $500 for each A they receive, and $1,000 for taking an AP Course. This way, students discover what colleges value in applicants, giving them a clearer way to see how to get into their college of choice.
Because we want young people to think about what they want to do with their lives, Raise.Me gets students to think about college very early on. Micro-scholarships translate an experience that students felt they couldn’t really influence into a gamified experience where they get to do micro-tasks – and get rewarded instantly for doing them. Doesn’t it seem a lot like gaming? With games giving players rewards along the way to keep them incentivized, you would never expect Super Mario to give you one big potential reward only at the very end of the game!
Raise.Me, co-founded in 2012 by friends Silverman, George Kirkland and Dave Schuman goes a step further than gamifing scholarships. Using the website, students can easily browse college, to discover where is the minimum GPA, average SAT/ACT score or tuition price. This would normally take browsing dozens of websites that aren’t similarly organized and saves students valuable time that they can use to study and get into a better college.
So far 60 colleges across the United States have become part of the Raise.Me platform, with millions in micro-scholarships being added to the platform. Each college makes a list of goals for students and students add their achievements to the Raise.Me portfolio of their account, which also includes a live feed of all their micro-scholarship earnings. After earning enough micro-scholarships, students can use Raise.Me to submit their portfolio to the college of their choice. A far easier process than panicking about if they can get into college at all at the end of high school!
With more and more colleges joining the program over time, Raise.Me is set to be a game changer for students looking for new opportunities to make it in the world!
