The Counselor's Corner blog made an excellent point about financial aid: some of the best sources of aid are local.

The nice people at the Counselor's Corner give their own examples. I went looking for a few myself that might illustrate the point.

One example is Bluefield State College. Their financial aid page mentions scholarships available at the school from (or funded by) American Electric Power. There's the Cardinal Resources/Raysal Area Scholarship awarded to a student from Raysal, WV. Bluefield State is in the heart of Appalachia, and a number of the region's major coal-related companies have scholarship funds available; some stipulate that a recipient must be interested in engineering technology and/or in a career in mining. Several local businesses have endowed scholarships. And there are almost two dozen scholarships that bear the name of a foundation or have been created in memory of some individual.

Each of these separate scholarships usually has specific qualifications attached. They help students from a particular county or region. They may be available only to student who will major in a particularly field.

I don't know the specifics of any particular scholarship like this at our example, Bluefield State College. But in general there's a great deal of variety in such scholarship awards. In some cases the there is a single scholarship available; one person at whatever college your looking at gets the Shlikulkowski Award for Polish Americans. Maybe they get it for a year and then have to reapply; maybe they get it for four years. Maybe it's a full ride, maybe it pays tuition only, or maybe it's a $500 annual grant that is a small-but-important component of a larger aid package.

Some of these sorts of endowed scholarships will be available to a number of students. For example, at your school there might be 10 awards available each year in the name of a local bank for students that will minor in accounting. And these sorts of awards don't have to be highly competitive. It's quite possible that only eight students applied for those one of those 10 awards at your school.

You can usually get details about these institutional scholarships by contacting the financial aid office at the college you're considering. And as a general rule, these are scholarships you apply for after you've been accepted.