Scholarships Offer Wacky Ways to Pay

March 4, 2009 -- What's in a name? Well, if your last name is Zolp and you're a student at Loyola University Chicago, your name is worth a whole lot.

Simply having the surname Zolp makes you eligible for tens of thousands of dollars in scholarship money.

In the 1970s, a Catholic priest named the Rev. William Zolp gave Loyola money for an endowed scholarship, but he gave it with some tight strings attached: His endowment provides money for any Catholic student with the last name of Zolp to attend the university, as long as the student can prove their name with birth and baptismal certificates.

Loyola's Zolp scholarship is one of a number of quirky scholarships across the country. There are scholarships for left-handed students, for surfers, for twins, for welders, for marble shooters, even for the children of Tupperware dealers. Unusual scholarships like these have led to an often repeated statistic that billions of dollars in scholarships go unclaimed every year.

"False," said Mark Kantrowitz, who's heard the rumor for years as publisher of FinAid.org and the director of Advanced Projects for FastWeb, a popular free scholarship database. "This myth of unclaimed scholarships is spread by organizations that want you to pay for something," like private scholarship counselors and paid databases that can charge thousands of dollars for their services.

Still, there are times that scholarship awards go unclaimed. From what Kantrowitz has seen, "The scholarships that go unfulfilled are the ones that can't be fulfilled."

College administrators who administer unusual scholarship awards see them as a big hassle for exactly that reason. "We like to be able to give money away," said Lorraine Branham, dean of Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications. "But sometimes restrictions by donors are so tight that we can't find students that fit the bill."

Edward Moore runs the Zolp scholarship as the scholarship director at Loyola University Chicago, and he says there are some years that it's a struggle to find students to take the money.

"There have been times in undergraduate admissions where if we're traveling out of state, we'll check the phone book," he said. "Are there any Zolps?"