The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

OIG inquiry submitted.

Just saw their FB post. Someone needs to answer why only 13 schoalrships were awarded. Government waste and abuse by Scholarship America et al.

Next thing you will see is them takign all of their Dellums videos down where they give out info on what the plan was.

Right....I did file OIG inquiry today. There's no way it hit them that soon to start putting out info finally. But, yeah, 13 awardees when they said AT LEAST 30 would be awarded. Crazy. Jobs need to go over this fiasco.

$3 million in funding for the Dellums Scholarship and that could only fund 13 recipients. Make it make sense. The math isn't mathing.

Wooooowww...they gave 13 scholarships. There's more participating facilities than that. Are they all going to Harvard or something? I think they should have given out notifications if you made it as a semi-finalist rather than have everyone wait. At least it gives the students more time to make adjustments moving forward instead of last minute decisions for a Plan B if needed.

500 applicants/13 selected.

I guess too busy with all of their government paid for conferences and junkets to either say 0 Dellums awards or 5 Dellums awards. If there were anymore than that, we would have seen someone post.

I wonder how much of that sell ms money was wasted on promo materials, college visits and even the SMART admin jobs. Tax payer money needs to be held accountable. I hope my OIG inquiry gets a response.

I sent a follow up email telling them I could understand they won’t be aware of all of the accepted ones but they should know how many awards they sent out.

Their reply:

we do not have that information at this time. It will be made available on our website in August.

I call BS!

And that line about them waiting for people to click 'accept' is BS. I mean even if you were undecided about it, you still click accept to move into the site visit. It does not obligate you to anything so no reason to delay accepting. So, they are not even good liars.

Thanks for reaching out. The overall handling of this program and transparency has been lacking here. I still have a number of issues with how this program was run and I do not trust what they are saying at this point. I'm going to ahead w an OIG inquiry just to hold them accountable in the future because there were some things that really messed w kids futures.

I actually reached out to Smart Scholarship.

There hasn't been one post/tag to your Facebook as someone who was a recipient. On all of the Smart Scholarship platforms there also hasn't been anyone that reports being a recipient as well. Were any Dellums Scholarships awarded? If so, are you able to say how many?

This was their reply.

Thank you for your email. Yes, we were able to send out Dellums scholarship awards. We are waiting on the final number of awardees to go into their portal and hit 'accept award' so we do not have an exact number of awards given out at this time. We expect to be able to publish that number on our website no later than August, once awardees become official Dellums SMART Scholars.

Wondering whether SMART falls under an organization that can be investigated by OIG. It seems that millions of dollars went somewhere else instead of going to students. Still not one person that has said they received an award.