The odds are better close to home: a national award is open to roughly 16.4 million U.S. undergraduates, while a campus or local award is open to one school's students — and in our own catalog the money is in the same low-thousands range either way.
National and local awards are usually competing for the same student with roughly the same amount of money. What separates them is how many people are allowed to want it. In fall 2024 there were 16,385,717 undergraduates enrolled in U.S. degree-granting institutions, and a genuinely national award draws on that whole pool rather than any one campus's slice of it. Most national awards still add a citizenship or residency condition, so none literally reaches all 16.4 million — the order of magnitude is the point, not the exact figure. A scholarship administered by one college's financial-aid office is capped at that college's enrollment before a single application is read.
Careful with the word: this is the eligible population, not the number of people who actually apply. Those are different numbers, and section 5 is about why we do not pretend to know the second one.
Our catalog holds 14,718 distinct awards, read off 229 colleges' own financial-aid sites plus five statewide catalogs and agencies. 3,931 of them publish a dollar figure, and 3,300 of those also carry one of the three scopes below. Here is the median largest published award for each, grouped by how wide the eligibility runs. These are our numbers, from our catalog — not a national survey, and not anyone else's dataset.
Medians of the largest published award: campus-scoped $1,250 (n = 2,977), national $2,500 (n = 50), single-state $5,000 (n = 273). The national sample is small enough that we would not put much weight on its exact value — the honest reading is that all three sit in the same low thousands, and national is not the outlier upward that people expect it to be.
It is also a much smaller one. Of those 14,718 awards, 85 — about 0.6% — are national in scope. At least 10,451 of them (71%) are scoped to a single campus or a single department. And the national label thins further the moment you check it: this month we researched 447 essay contests that market themselves as open nationwide, and 58 cleared our bar for being currently running, free to enter, verifiable on the sponsor's own page, and genuinely open to any U.S. student. The most common disqualifier by a wide margin was a restriction on major or field of study; after that came membership or affiliation gates, contests we could not verify on the sponsor's own site at all, and cycles that had closed with no next date published. Entry fees and quiet state or regional limits did turn up, but they were among the smallest categories — the reasons people expect are not the reasons that actually thin the list.
Among those 58 confirmed nationally-open essay contests, the median top prize is $1,000 (n = 53 publish a figure). Ours, researched 2026-08-28.
There is no index of them, which is the entire reason they go under-applied for. The campus and departmental awards in our catalog exist on 229 separate financial-aid sites, and we got them by reading those sites one at a time. Federal Student Aid's own guidance points at the same scattered places — a college's financial-aid office, your state's higher education agency, community and religious organizations, local businesses and community foundations, your high school counselor's office, and your or your parents' employer — and it gives our reason in the same breath, saying those local sources “may increase your chances of obtaining scholarships because each has a smaller pool of applicants.” A Federal Student Aid webinar adds individual academic departments to the list and puts the trade-off plainly: those smaller sources are “often untapped resources,” and while the awards “might be smaller,” you “might be more competitive in the pool.”
If you have already written one scholarship essay, the constraint on working this list is usually time rather than ideas — six local applications means six prompts, not six new stories, which is the working method our guide to writing a scholarship essay walks through. ScholarDuck exists to help with exactly that part: it keeps the stories you have already told and helps you refit them to the next prompt, so a long list of small local awards stays worth doing. It will not find you an award you are not eligible for, and it does not press submit.
You may have seen a page confidently claim local scholarships are some specific number of times easier to win. We are not going to give you one, because we cannot source it. Our catalog has no applicant-count field, for the plain reason that the providers' pages we read do not publish applicant counts to put in it. Eligible population is the number we can actually check, so it is the only one on this page. Everything above is either a federal statistic with a citation or a count from our own catalog, labelled as ours.
Almost certainly, though nobody can give you an honest number. A national award is open to roughly 16.4 million U.S. undergraduates; an award run by one college's financial-aid office is capped at that college's enrollment. That is a difference in eligible population of about three orders of magnitude. It is not a measured win rate, because providers do not publish how many applications they receive.
Less than people assume, and in our catalog not reliably less at all. Across the 3,300 awards in our catalog that publish a dollar figure and are scoped to a campus, a single state, or the nation, the median largest published award is $1,250 for a campus-scoped award, $2,500 for a national one, and $5,000 for a single-state one. Those are our numbers from our own catalog, and the national sample (n = 50) is small.
They are not in one place, which is why they get missed. Federal Student Aid points to your college's financial-aid office and its individual academic departments, your state's higher-education agency, community and religious organizations, local businesses and community foundations, and your or your parents' employer. Ask each of those directly rather than expecting a search engine to have gathered them.
No. Apply to the national ones you are genuinely a strong fit for, especially the large renewable ones, then spend the rest of your time on local awards where your application is one of far fewer. The mistake is spending all of your effort at the top of the list because those are the awards that advertise to you.
Often not. We researched 447 essay contests marketed as open nationwide and 58 cleared our bar for being currently running, free to enter, verifiable on the sponsor's own page, and genuinely open to any U.S. student. The most common reason for cutting one was a restriction on major or field of study; after that, membership or affiliation requirements, contests we could not verify on the sponsor's own site, and cycles that had closed with no next date. Entry fees and regional limits appeared too, but far less often than people assume. Read the eligibility page on the sponsor's own site before you write anything.