Is My Mom Right About What You Need To Get A High School Scholarship?
It’s 8:15 on a Tuesday, I’m wiping pasta sauce off the dinner counter, the dishwasher is humming, and my 11-year-old golden retriever is working on a chewed-up slipper by the table. My 16-year-old Lila, a junior gearing up for college applications, is leaning against the fridge scrolling her phone, half a cheese taquito sweating on a paper plate next to her. She looks up, squints, and says, “There’s this thread on Reddit. Some girl’s asking, ‘To all those who have gotten high school scholarships, is my mom right?’ Her mom says if you have any grade below an A, you might as well not even bother applying. Is that… is that what you think?”
I pause mid-wipe. Lila got a B in AP Chemistry last semester, and she’s been obsessing over it ever since she locked in on art school—tuition there is not cheap, so scholarships aren’t a nice bonus, they’re a necessity. I tell her about my niece Mia, who went through this exact panic three years ago. Mia was applying to the same program Lila wants to attend, and my sister (Mia’s mom) spent three nights awake panicking over a B Mia got in sophomore year PE. Mia had missed two weeks of class to go to a national teen art competition, where she won second place, but my sister was convinced that single B would sink every scholarship application Mia sent. In the end, Mia got a full tuition scholarship. When she met the admissions team later, they talked for 20 minutes about her portfolio of murals for the local children’s hospital and her essay about why she started that project. No one even mentioned the PE B.
Lila leans back, still frowning. “But all the reels I see say you need a 4.0 unweighted and 10 extracurriculars to get anything. What if that girl’s mom is just being realistic?”
I tell her what our high school guidance counselor said at Lila’s college planning meeting last month. Last year, 70% of the scholarships her students won went to kids with GPAs between 3.2 and 3.8. The straight-A kids all pile into the same 10 big national scholarships that get 20,000 applicants each, so the odds are terrible no matter how good your grades are. Most smaller, niche scholarships get fewer than 100 applicants, and a lot go unclaimed every year because no one who fits the criteria bothers to apply.
That’s where the real opportunity is, and it doesn’t require a perfect transcript. The practical stuff isn’t complicated, and it’s not about cramming your schedule full of activities to impress anyone. First, instead of sorting your scholarship list by how much money they give, sort it by how well they fit what you actually do. If you’re Lila, that means filtering for scholarships for art students, for people who volunteer with animal rescue, for kids who live in our state. That cuts the applicant pool by 90% right away. Last year, a kid at Lila’s school got an $8,000 scholarship just for being a teen who works at a coffee shop and wants to study graphic design. Only 12 kids applied.
Second, don’t rule yourself out just because your GPA is a little under their posted minimum. I talked to a local Rotary Club scholarship coordinator last year, and she said they throw out less than 5% of applications for being a little under the GPA cutoff if the rest of the application lines up with what they’re looking for. If they want kids who do community service, and you do 10 hours a week of community service, it doesn’t matter if your GPA is 3.3 instead of their 3.5 minimum. Most organizations give out scholarships to support people who align with their mission, not just reward the highest test scores.
Third, don’t pad your activity list. If you only went to student council twice last semester, leave it off. Scholarship readers look through hundreds of applications a week, they can spot a padded list in 10 seconds. It’s better to list three things you actually spent time on and care about than 10 things you checked a box for.
The thing is, that girl’s mom isn’t entirely wrong. She’s right that you can’t just apply to one scholarship and cross your fingers. She’s right that you have to put the work in to fill out the applications, write the essays, and get your recommendations in on time. A lot of kids don’t get any scholarships at all not because their grades aren’t perfect, but because they only applied to two big ones and gave up when they didn’t get those. I know a kid down the street who got a $15,000 scholarship after applying to 11 different ones. He got rejected from the first nine, so the 10th and 11th were the ones that paid off. That part of the mom’s advice is right: effort matters, luck plays a part, but you increase your odds by putting in the work on the right applications, not just making your transcript look perfect.
Lila takes a bite of her taquito, nods, and says okay, so my B in Chem isn’t going to ruin everything. I tell her that it’s not, and this weekend we’ll sit down for a couple hours and sort through those niche scholarships together, no panic, just coffee and cookies. She grabs her portfolio that’s propped by the door and heads up to her room to work on a new piece she’s doing for the animal shelter’s fundraiser. The dog sneaks over and grabs the rest of her taquito off the plate, and I don’t even bother chasing him.
We don’t know yet if Lila will get enough scholarship money to cover art school. There’s still a lot that’s uncertain. But we’ve stopped obsessing over that one B, and we’re just taking it one step at a time. If that girl on Reddit is reading this, that’s my answer: your mom is half right. Effort matters, but perfection doesn’t.
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