I know that I get a bunch of traffic from high school students researching their Shakespeare homework. Having been down this road before I know that if they think Shakespeare is hard, wait until the time comes to fill out those college applications. Given the choice between memorizing Cymbeline, and filling out financial aid paperwork, I’ll take Cymbeline. The Scholarship Blog is one of many sites that hopes to help kids get into college by offering scholarship information, tips for essay writing, templates and other useful advice for making the application process as easy as possible. Their blog is intriguing to me. It appears to follow news in the scholarship and college admissions area. For instance I see a story about academic dishonesty, affirmative action, and drop-out rates among Latino students. My question is, who is the audience for this information? High school students? Not sure that they’re interested in such things. The parents, maybe. Educators, certainly. But why would educators be following a blog that’s setup by a company offering scholarship tips? What I do like about this site is that it really appears to be all about the information, and not about the quick buck. Anybody who’s into web development and search engine optimization (SEO) these days can tell you that one of the big money items is in linking to college scholarship “deals”. A friend of mine even runs a company that offers a directory of such links and he’s making a fortune. But I had to go through this site and hunt around looking for affiliate links or other clues that they’re trying to drive you down paths that will make them money. There are some Google AdSense ads, but they’re not annoying about it. It’s actually a very nice site that’s heavily loaded with information. Honestly, to the point of being pretty dry. You really need to be interested in what you’re reading for this sort of stuff. The simple and sad fact is that college is insanely expensive and everybody knows it. I’ve got 3 kids now and eventually they’re all going to be heading for college, I can only imagine what that’s going to cost me. So when somebody comes along that looks like they’re offering legit, non-biased information and not simply trying to get me to click on the dancing monkey, I’ve got to put it in the “good stuff” folder. Once you’re done with that paper on Romeo and Juliet, go bookmark it for this spring when you really need it.
