Scholarship Jackpot

As a high school senior last year in Lompoc, Calif., Patrick Cole wanted to go on to college outside his native state, but the cost seemed beyond him. He had saved only $200 from his part-time job and did not want to turn to his family's modest income for more help. Then Cole discovered that he had some other resources: he is black, Catholic, interested in theology, and gets good grades. He took advantage of those characteristics and this fall is a freshman at the University of Notre Dame, supported by four scholarships totaling $11,600.

Cole's circumstances began to change after he read a newspaper advertisement for Scholarship Search, a Manhattan-based firm that uses a computer to match students with available scholarships. Like some 10,000 other students who applied to the company last year, he paid a $25 fee and filled out a form requesting information about his race, religion, ethnic background and special interests. The data was fed into an IBM System/360 computer crammed with information about 250,000 possible sources of financial aid--from corporations, unions, colleges and other public and private organizations--totaling $500 million. For Cole, the computer delivered an individualized printout listing 24 potential scholarships; he wrote to about 20 and hit the jackpot with five. (He had to turn one down because it was restricted to students attending California colleges.

Roping in Funds. The computer's memory has room for some far from ordinary awards. Harvard, for example, offers more than $24,000 to needy students named Anderson, Baxendale, Borden, Bright, Downer, Murphy or Pennoyer (granted by benefactors of the same names), while Yale has $1,000 earmarked for persons named Leavenworth or DeForest. The Mae Helene Bacon-Boggs fund grants $300 a year to a female graduate of Shasta College who is admitted to the University of California at Berkeley, if she can prove that she does not drink or smoke. Carleton College provides about $600 to farmers' daughters. The University of Arizona offers $500 to any student with a 2.5 grade-point average--who also has roped calves in a rodeo. And the Union Pacific Railroad offers 300 scholarships of $400 each to students living in counties its trains pass through.

"We don't promise to get students a scholarship," says Robert Freede, head of Scholarship Search. "But we promise to put them in touch with grants they are eligible for." Last year, Freede says, two of every five applicants got financial aid ranging from $500 to $6,000. Scholarship Search--which Freede took over in 1972 when he had three children in college and was spending $20,000 annually on their education--is not doing badly itself. Freede has raised the finder's fee to $39, but he expects the number of applicants to more than double and predicts that the firm will earn $1 million this year.

For his part, Patrick Cole has been keeping Scholarship Search busy. He decided to change his major from theology to journalism and sent in a new application. The result: a printout listing 21 more scholarship sources. Cole is applying to three of them.

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