How does RaiseMe Make Money?
Essentially the RaiseMe app and Raise.me website make money by serving as a massive lead generation source for colleges and universities. The participating colleges offer “micro scholarships” to high school students to get good grades and participate in extra curricular activities and sports.
A micro-scholarship is an amount of money that students are eligible to earn based on individual achievements throughout 9th-12th grade. They are awarded by colleges and universities who partner with RaiseMe, and each college or university creates their own program of micro-scholarship. The amount earned via RaiseMe represents the minimum amount of institutional aid that the college will award you if you are accepted and enroll in their school.
Colleges decide what achievements they want to award and how much they will award to students who meet their eligibility requirements (which can be found on their College page). For example, one college might offer $50 for an A in Algebra, another might offer $300, and so on.
For students who are already planning on going to one of the colleges represented by RaiseMe, this is a great service. The cost to high school students for this free service is giving up your information and allowing the participating colleges and universities to market to you directly.
What are the biggest complaints about RaiseMe?
- Limited primarily to just high school students. Not for currently enrolled college students and certainly not helpful for older students who are looking to change careers.
- Doesn’t take into account things like AICE test scores or weighted GPA’s.
- Despite the fact there are well over 300 participating institutions, one of the top complaints is there are not enough participating colleges and universities.
- The ‘micro scholarships’ are basically the same amount of financial aid the schools would offer (true in some cases, but not an entirely fair complaint).
Is RaiseMe a scam?
There are a number of shady scholarship aggregators on the market, RaiseMe is not one of them. The service is transparent and can serve as a good way to get high school students thinking about college early, which in turn may lead to a more focused effort on learning and participating in extra curricular activities.
As of this writing, the RaiseMe app has 4.8 star rating from more than 13,000 reviews and what’s most impressive is the small ration of one star rates.