How AI Is Quietly Transforming the Scholarship Application Process

For students, applying to scholarships can be totally overwhelming. Endless essays, lengthy forms, tons of deadlines to manage, and even if you apply, that doesn’t mean you’ll be awarded the funding. This can mean weeks of work go straight down the drain if none of your identified scholarship opportunities pan out. However, AI has proven to be a hidden force multiplier for students searching for and applying for scholarships. Almost everyone knows about the many flashy use-cases for AI, like writing, coding, or telling jokes, but very few know that there are AI tools out there that can substantially level up your ability to apply for and win scholarships. Today, we’re going to walk through how artificial intelligence is quietly transforming the scholarship application process for both applicants, as well as providers.

Supercharging Scholarship Applications

One of the toughest parts of applying for scholarships can be essay requirements. Almost every scholarship that requires an application separate from the university application is going to require an essay, often something similar to a condensed personal statement, or an essay about a topic aligned specifically to the mission of the providing organization. It almost goes without saying at this point that AI can dramatically increase the speed with which you can write these essays, and totally eliminates the anxiety of starting from scratch. One of our strongest recommendations here at Gradly, though, is to not simply have your AI generate every word of the essay, but rather have it generate an outline from which you can then write the essay in your own words. The quality will almost certainly be much higher and the humans on the other side of the process will also be able to detect the extra effort you put into your application.

After drafting a few different essays for various scholarship applications, AI can be used to easily tailor your essay to different scholarship applications. For scholarships that are vaguely similar in terms of the providing organization, this can sometimes be as simple as pasting your essay into the AI, and prompting it to rewrite your essay for the other organization. Be wary, though, as most AI platforms will dilute the substance of your essay with each subsequent rewrite; make sure that it is not eliminating the “meat” of your application and replacing it with “AI Slop.”

AI can also be used to simply enhance the quality of your essay. Use AI tools to quickly and easily pressure test your ideas, themes, and cohesiveness. Prompt the AI to surface grammatical issues, issues with the clarity of your points, or have it guide you on how to restructure the essay altogether. Platforms like Gradly offer tools straight out-of-the-box to work on scholarship essays that will intake your original draft and output a far better version in just a couple of seconds if you’d prefer not to do the prompting yourself.

Watch out though, providers are using AI too

In just a few short years, scholarships that were receiving just a hundred applications per year are now receiving thousands thanks to the rise of AI tools like Gradly that scrape the Internet for all available student opportunities. However, as applications rise, so too does the capacity of providers to rapidly review and grade those applications. In a strange twist of irony, the current system is almost like an AI belonging to the scholarship provider being used to review the work of the AI being used by the student to generate the application materials in the first place. To the extent that this is the paradigm, this means whoever uses AI the best will win those scholarship dollars.

Providers now have the ability to efficiently filter extremely large volumes of applications, score them based on predefined criteria, and flag standout candidates before a human has even laid eyes on the application. AI can be used to match applicants to open opportunities based on highly nuanced factors like soft skills, interests, and essays that indicate vague alignment with the organization’s values. So while it has never been a better time to be a student applying for scholarships, it has also never been a better time to be a provider of them as well. If you’re a student applying for scholarships, it is almost a guarantee that an AI is going to be what selects you for the award.

AI Reveals Hidden Scholarship Opportunities

Anyone that applied for scholarship funding before ~2022 knows that the scholarship system used to be extremely convoluted, messy, and rife with misinformation. There were no shortage of databases that purported to contain all possible scholarship opportunities, but in practice, they were plagued with outdated information, broken links, incorrect due dates, and more. Students often found them so difficult to use that it was easier to simply give up and mentally write off any possibility of securing additional funding.

Those days are over. With the rise of scholarship search AI tools like Gradly, a thirty second search can find all possible scholarship opportunities with fully up-to-date information. Gradly, for example, scrapes the entire Internet in search of opportunities that users are uniquely qualified for, taking into account GPA, demographic details, nationality, and destination university. Furthermore, each recommendation is pressure tested to ensure that the user is not being provided old, outdated information, and for this reason, broken links are a thing of the past. And it’s not just flagship, major scholarships that are being surfaced, Gradly finds scholarships from private companies, governments (local, national), NGOs, and more. A thirty second search can literally save users $50,000 or more.

This is nowhere near over yet

Within just a couple of years, AI has undeniably had a transformative impact on the entire scholarship system. If you’re a student applying for them, AI is already finding the right opportunities, and drafting your application materials. If you’re a scholarship provider, AI is likely reviewing all of your applications and surfacing the best-fit candidates. It’s AI all the way down.

This transformation is just the beginning. AI’s role in this landscape will only grow stronger and more sophisticated. We may even see a return to some form of paper applications like we’re seeing with exams on college campuses (who knows how that will work, but it’s the only way to weed out AI usage). Whatever the future, the answer for now is to fully embrace these AI scholarship tools. Anyone who isn’t is destined to be left in the dust.