Most students apply to a handful of scholarships and never find out why they missed out, or realise they were never really in the running for that one to begin with. Knowing what a scholarship is checking for before you apply changes that.
Why scholarships are worth applying for
- Help cover education costs, including course fees, textbooks & everyday living expenses
- Strengthen a resume or university application
- Open doors to networks, mentoring & other opportunities beyond the funding itself
- Don’t need to be paid back, unlike a student loan
What’s the difference between a scholarship, bursary, grant, and prize?
These words get used almost interchangeably, but they’re not quite the same thing. The University of Melbourne distinguishes scholarships (awarded based on merit or personal circumstances), prizes (awarded for a specific current achievement), bursaries (awarded for financial need), and grants (put toward education costs more broadly). The University of Sydney adds that bursaries specifically cover essential living and study costs, not things like tuition or travel.
In practice, the lines blur constantly. Some universities use “bursary” and “scholarship” as different words for the same thing, and a “prize” for a single outstanding piece of work can function exactly like a one-off scholarship.
Merit scholarships
Merit scholarships are awarded for what you’ve achieved. They can be based on:
- Academic achievement, usually strong results in senior secondary studies or in a university course already underway
- Sporting excellence, shown through competition results, representative honours, or a clear elite pathway
- Creative or artistic talent, demonstrated through a portfolio, audition, or recorded performance
- Leadership, built through student leadership, captaincy, or a track record of organising others toward a shared goal
- Community involvement, particularly sustained volunteering over time, more than a single one-off event
Most merit scholarships are offered directly by individual universities. There’s no single centralised application, so eligibility and what counts as evidence changes from one institution to the next.
Equity scholarships
Equity scholarships work differently, responding to financial hardship or educational disadvantage instead of achievement. This can include:
- Financial hardship, often connected to a Centrelink payment like Youth Allowance or ABSTUDY
- First Nations students
- Students with disability
- Students from regional or remote areas
- Students who are the first in their family to attend university
You’ll usually still need to meet the course’s entry requirements, but your academic performance beyond that isn’t the deciding factor. For more detail on two of these groups specifically, we’ve got separate guides on scholarships for regional and rural students and scholarships for students with disabilities.
Subject-specific and industry scholarships
A third category doesn’t sit neatly under either of the above, since it’s built around funding source and field of study rather than achievement or circumstance. These come from employers, industry bodies, or professional associations wanting to attract people into a specific field, engineering, nursing, or teaching, for example.
They tend to split into two different arrangements. Some are tied to future employment: the sponsor covers your study costs, and in return you commit to working for them, or in that industry, for a set period after you finish. Others carry no such obligation, offered by a professional association or foundation simply to support people studying in that field.
Eligibility and structure vary widely by industry and sponsor, so this deserves its own read instead of a full summary here. Our guide on industry-specific scholarships goes into more detail.
One-off vs ongoing scholarships
Scholarships also differ in how long they last. Some pay out once, covering a single year, semester, or specific cost, and finish there. Others are ongoing, continuing for the length of a degree provided certain conditions keep being met, most often maintaining a minimum level of academic performance, staying enrolled full-time, or continuing to meet the circumstances the scholarship was originally awarded for. The University of Melbourne structures its coursework scholarships this way too, either as a one-off payment or a series of regular payments spread across the course.
This matters when comparing offers. Because ongoing scholarships pay out repeatedly, their total value across a degree depends on how long they run, not just the amount advertised up front, and losing eligibility partway through can mean losing the funding too. Whether an offer is one-off or ongoing, and what’s required to keep it, is worth checking before accepting, not after.
Working out which category fits you
A single scholarship can sit in more than one category at once. An equity scholarship might still expect solid entry requirements, and a merit scholarship might specifically target students heading into a particular field. The title alone won’t tell you this, so reading the full criteria is what shows what a scholarship is looking for, and whether it fits your situation.
Our scholarships hub has more on how to apply, current opportunities in our database, and support for specific circumstances.
