Winston coached people to find scholarships. He helped them complete their profiles on various search engines. He guided them to several scholarship search engines. Peterson’s.com was one of his favorite search engines. After recommending it for 2 years, Peterson’s implemented changes that reduced its use for current college students. Then, he found people started receiving spam and invitations to surveys more than they received information about actual scholarships. He finally stopped recommending Peterson’s.com to people.
Advantages of Peterson’s.com
www.Petersons.com offers help with undergraduate, graduate school, continuing education, and international students. They provide assistance with:
- Test preparations
- Scholarship search
- Paying for college
- Essay writing help
- GRE, LSAT, and MCAT preparation
- Paying for Grad Schools
- Choosing a Graduate School
- Distance learning
- Different colleges and community programs for continuing education
Peterson’s uses Cappex for its scholarship search.
The web site offers articles for finding and obtaining financial aid, completing the FAFSA, and other trends in financial aid.
Disadvantages of Peterson’s.com
Cappex stipulates that to use their service, “You also agree that Cappex may share your information with Peterson's or its affiliates, including but not limited to Student Marketing Group, subject to the Peterson's Privacy Policy and Peterson's Terms of Use” Our experience indicates the Student Marketing Group sells email addresses, includes ads disguised as offers, and surveys to share your information with several other of their clients.
One of the most depressing changes Peterson’s made was to limit the number of years you could use as your high school graduation date. When we first starting recommending Peterson’s, you could mark a high school graduation between 1955 and four years in the future. In the last 2 years we found it was limited to this year and four years in the future. As a result, they eliminated all current college students and all non-traditional students.
Peterson’s seemed to share more surveys, contests, and other speculative awards than real scholarship offers. We stopped recommending it.
Thursday we review how to list achievements, awards, and more on your master application
Excellent post Larry.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that they would stop servicing current college students and non-traditional students. I wonder what their reasoning was?
As I have been searching for scholarships I have found that almost all sites like, Cappex are selling student information to third parties. I guess they have to make money some way, I just wish there was a different way then selling information to the highest bidder.