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Now that your college applications are (hopefully) submitted, it’s a good idea to start applying to scholarships. Many kids put them off until March or so, so by applying now you gain a few more opportunities to  win than you would otherwise have if you procrastinate.

Occasionally in high school, we would have opportunities to work on scholarship applications during classtime in a computer lab. Wherever I looked in the classroom, people were working on online scholarship applications, most found on the website FastWeb.

Although online scholarships are worth applying to, in actuality, they are not as effective uses of your time as a local scholarship.

The appeal of an online scholarship

Online scholarships are mostly very simple — enter in your basic information, maybe type up an essay, and hit “Submit”. They’re very simple and quick, and you can easily fill out three or four basic ones a day. Often you’ll need an essay, but most of the essays will be no longer than 500 words. You don’t usually need any letters of recommendation or copies of your high school transcripts. All you need is to provide your SAT/ACT scores, your GPA, and a few other basic details about yourself.

The simplicity of these scholarships makes them appealing — because you can apply so fast, you feel very accomplished for putting in little effort. When your mother asks if you started on any scholarships, you can smugly smile and say, “I applied to four today!”

The slim odds of an online scholarship

Local scholarship applications are usually trickier

However, even though these scholarships are quick and rather painless, you’re mostly wasting your time. You see, online scholarships are almost always open nationwide (or statewide). This means that countless high school students are applying to them. Of the thousands of high schools in the country, you can safely assume that at least two or three people from each school will apply to that scholarship (if not more). Therefore, you’re competing against thousands of  other students for that one single bit of money. The odds of you winning are incredibly slim — all it takes is one of those thousands of students to stand out more than you on paper to eliminate your chances of winning.

And chances are, if the scholarship application was very simple and didn’t ask for much extra (ie, letters of recommendation or essays), all it takes is one person with higher test scores or a higher GPA to eliminate you. And, since these scholarships are so simple, chances are that even more students apply to them.

Local scholarships provide much better odds.

Local scholarships are daunting at first because most of them require a lot more work on your part — letters of recommendation, copies of transcripts, more essays, and so forth. Sometimes you even have to go to more effort to turn them in!

However, this is where the appeal from local scholarships lies: people are lazy. Many don’t go through the hassle of a local scholarship, so very few apply to them. Often, local scholarships will have 30 or fewer people applying to them, which increases your odds of winning drastically.

In fact, many local scholarships can be won simply by filling the application out. I won a local scholarship last year because I was the only one who properly answered the essay prompt — nobody else who turned in an application properly addressed the question. One girl in my class even won a scholarship because she was the only one to turn in an application. It didn’t matter how well-written her essay was — she won by default!

If you find local scholarships that are specific to you (ethnicity, academic strengths, and so forth), your odds of winning are surprisingly high. I won three out of the five local scholarships I applied to, but zero out of about twenty online scholarships.

Don’t give up on online scholarships.

Even though your chances of winning an online scholarship are slim, they still are not a waste of time. The simple scholarships that don’t require much time are still worth applying to. You  may just win.

But your best luck with online scholarships will come from finding niche scholarships: ones that are specific to you or require something extra, such as reading a certain book or writing on an obscure topic. For the same reason as the local scholarships, your odds of winning these are much higher.

Even though online scholarships are appealing, in the end you’ll have a much better chance at earning free money through a local scholarship. Even though local scholarships are typically far more work, the payoff will come when you find out that you won. So make the best use of your time, and give yourself a better chance at paying for college!