Thanks for this post and scholarship! This is an exciting opportunity for international high school students. If this scholarship were available 6 years ago when I was a high school student, and I was as excited about EA as I am now, I would definitely have applied.
I’ve publicized the scholarship to the EA Philippines community, my network, and through EA Philippines’s social media, such as through this post on Facebook. I don’t think any of our active community members are still high school students, but maybe a few people in our extended network would apply and be a good fit.
I looked through the application form though and I wonder if Section 5 might be time-consuming and difficult to fill up? Maybe they would eventually have to fill up details like that for financial aid applications, but it’s possible this application form would be the first time (and possibly also the first and only time) they’d gather these numbers from their parents. If so, it would probably take 1-3 hours for each applicant to fill that up, including talking to their parents to get the numbers.
Have you considered maybe asking for just a couple of fields about the applicant’s family’s financial situation, and then you can ask for more details when they are in the later stages of the application process? This is to avoid wasting their time if they are highly unlikely anyway to get the scholarship.
Alternatively, maybe to avoid having applicants that clearly won’t get the scholarship or clearly won’t get in to the schools, maybe you could give a few ways people can gauge how likely they are to get in to these top schools? Or like what Nathan Young said, maybe you can write a few details on how likely it is they would get this scholarship?
Some students are just bad at estimating their chances of getting in abroad, and some might be ambitious/overconfident, so you might get people who apply that only have a low chance of getting the scholarship or getting into a top school.
Another suggestion on how to make the application form slightly better is to state in the form’s description that the form autosaves your answers even after you close the tab, allowing people to not have to complete the form in one go. (I presume Paperform does this for all forms).
We did consider asking for less detailed information in the financial information section for the exact reason you point out, but we ultimately felt that the current approach struck the best balance between a number of countervailing considerations. (For example, having to ask all of the most promising candidates to provide additional information at a second stage would have added to turnaround times, which would in turn have required us to set earlier application deadlines.)
Note that the financial section of our application form already requires applicants to provide meaningfully less granular information than the CSS/FAFSA forms and most of the university-specific financial aid forms I have seen, so I’m hoping that this won’t be too onerous on candidates.
Also, some people’s parents would be quite hesitant to disclose what they actually make to their child. So that would just make it much harder for a student to get accurate figures on what their parents make.
I’m not sure what the solution there is, but potentially you want to account for that scenario some way, such as giving the student the option to just give a rough ballpark of what their parents/family make, especially at just the 1st stage of the application.
Strongly agree. In the USA it wouldn’t be considered too abnormal for a child to tell a parent that he/she is applying for a scholarship for college and needs family income information. But because this scholarship is targeted at people from other cultures we should take those US-centric (or perhaps UK-centric) assumptions.
Perhaps a drop-down menu in which an applicant could select from various ranges might be a better shop: “To the best of your knowledge, what was your households total annual income for the previous calendar year: 0-10k, 10k-30k, 31k to 50k...”
Thanks for this post and scholarship! This is an exciting opportunity for international high school students. If this scholarship were available 6 years ago when I was a high school student, and I was as excited about EA as I am now, I would definitely have applied.
I’ve publicized the scholarship to the EA Philippines community, my network, and through EA Philippines’s social media, such as through this post on Facebook. I don’t think any of our active community members are still high school students, but maybe a few people in our extended network would apply and be a good fit.
I looked through the application form though and I wonder if Section 5 might be time-consuming and difficult to fill up? Maybe they would eventually have to fill up details like that for financial aid applications, but it’s possible this application form would be the first time (and possibly also the first and only time) they’d gather these numbers from their parents. If so, it would probably take 1-3 hours for each applicant to fill that up, including talking to their parents to get the numbers.
Have you considered maybe asking for just a couple of fields about the applicant’s family’s financial situation, and then you can ask for more details when they are in the later stages of the application process? This is to avoid wasting their time if they are highly unlikely anyway to get the scholarship.
Alternatively, maybe to avoid having applicants that clearly won’t get the scholarship or clearly won’t get in to the schools, maybe you could give a few ways people can gauge how likely they are to get in to these top schools? Or like what Nathan Young said, maybe you can write a few details on how likely it is they would get this scholarship?
Some students are just bad at estimating their chances of getting in abroad, and some might be ambitious/overconfident, so you might get people who apply that only have a low chance of getting the scholarship or getting into a top school.
Another suggestion on how to make the application form slightly better is to state in the form’s description that the form autosaves your answers even after you close the tab, allowing people to not have to complete the form in one go. (I presume Paperform does this for all forms).
Thanks—I’ve now added something along those lines to the description.
We did consider asking for less detailed information in the financial information section for the exact reason you point out, but we ultimately felt that the current approach struck the best balance between a number of countervailing considerations. (For example, having to ask all of the most promising candidates to provide additional information at a second stage would have added to turnaround times, which would in turn have required us to set earlier application deadlines.)
Note that the financial section of our application form already requires applicants to provide meaningfully less granular information than the CSS/FAFSA forms and most of the university-specific financial aid forms I have seen, so I’m hoping that this won’t be too onerous on candidates.
I see, got it!
Also, some people’s parents would be quite hesitant to disclose what they actually make to their child. So that would just make it much harder for a student to get accurate figures on what their parents make.
I’m not sure what the solution there is, but potentially you want to account for that scenario some way, such as giving the student the option to just give a rough ballpark of what their parents/family make, especially at just the 1st stage of the application.
Strongly agree. In the USA it wouldn’t be considered too abnormal for a child to tell a parent that he/she is applying for a scholarship for college and needs family income information. But because this scholarship is targeted at people from other cultures we should take those US-centric (or perhaps UK-centric) assumptions.
Perhaps a drop-down menu in which an applicant could select from various ranges might be a better shop: “To the best of your knowledge, what was your households total annual income for the previous calendar year: 0-10k, 10k-30k, 31k to 50k...”