At the bottom line, college scholarships are a financial instrument that allows you to attend college and have part of all of your expenses paid for by the scholarship. This might be a discounted tuition rate, full tuition reimbursement, it may include books and lab fees, and it may also include housing expenses. When you look at the total cost of attending college over 4 years (assuming you can even DO it in 4 years), the cost of college is a very respectable four-digit number, perhaps even five figures. Having a scholarship to defray part of all of that cost can mean the difference between going to a community college versus a brand name college, or even worse, the difference between attending college and not attending college at all.

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