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CollegeScholarships.org Directory Scraper

LEAD GENERATIONEDUCATION
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CollegeScholarships.org Directory Scraper

Scrapes the complete scholarship directory from CollegeScholarships.org — one of the web's longest-running US scholarship databases, covering athletic, demographic, company-sponsored, and subject-specific award categories since 1999.

What it does

The actor crawls the /scholarships/ category tree, following category and sub-category pages, and extracts each scholarship entry as a structured record. Each record includes:

  • Scholarship name and sponsoring organization
  • Category path (e.g. sports/archery, asian, veterans, companies/target)
  • Editorial description from the page
  • External application or sponsor URL (when present)
  • Source page URL and scrape timestamp

Use cases

  • Lead generation — Build lists of active scholarship opportunities by demographic niche, sport, or company sponsor
  • Academic research — Analyze the US scholarship landscape by category and sponsor type
  • EdTech products — Populate scholarship matching or recommendation engines with verified, categorized awards
  • Competitive analysis — Map scholarship coverage across athletic, demographic, and company-sponsored segments

Input

Field Type Default Description
maxItems integer 100 Maximum number of scholarships to scrape (0 = no limit)
startUrls array [] Optional list of specific category page URLs. If empty, the full directory is crawled from the root

Full run: Leave startUrls empty and set maxItems: 0 to scrape all ~8,000 scholarships across every category.

Targeted run: Supply specific category URLs in startUrls to focus on a particular segment:

[
  { "url": "https://www.collegescholarships.org/scholarships/sports/football.htm" },
  { "url": "https://www.collegescholarships.org/scholarships/veterans.htm" }
]

Output

Each record in the dataset:

{
  "scholarship_name": "National Field Archery Association Foundation",
  "detail_url": "https://www.collegescholarships.org/scholarships/sports/archery.htm",
  "category": "sports/archery",
  "sponsor": "National Field Archery Association Foundation",
  "description": "The National Field Archery Association Foundation (NFAAF) has joined forces with the Easton Foundations...",
  "application_url": "http://www.nfaa-archery.org/",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-06-12T05:00:00.000Z"
}

Site coverage

The directory spans:

  • Athletic — 30+ sports (archery, baseball, basketball, football, soccer, swimming, and more)
  • Demographic — Asian, Hispanic, Native American, women, first-generation, foster children
  • Company-sponsored — Fortune 500 programs (Target, Pepsi, McDonald's, Walmart, and many more)
  • Subject-specific — Teaching, nursing, cosmetology, law, engineering, and others
  • Military — Veterans, spouses, children, and dependents
  • Health conditions — Cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, and other medical condition-specific awards
  • Degree level — Undergraduate through doctoral programs

Technical notes

  • Static HTML site — no JavaScript rendering required
  • No anti-bot measures detected (200 OK from datacenter IPs)
  • Polite crawling at 3 concurrent requests
  • Each category page contains multiple scholarship entries (h2/h3 headings with descriptive paragraphs)
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