FRC Scholarships: How FIRST Can Help Pay for College

FIRST helps thousands of robotics students pay for college through a dedicated scholarship program that lists tens of millions of dollars in awards from colleges, corporations, and professional organizations. If you're on an FRC team, you already qualify for many of them, and most don't require winning a single match or award.

That last part trips people up, so let's be clear up front: you do not have to be a robot-driving prodigy or your team's lead programmer to get this money. Simply being a student on a registered FIRST team makes you eligible for a large chunk of the scholarships FIRST lists. Here's how the whole thing actually works, and how to make sure you don't leave money on the table.

How the FIRST scholarship program works

FIRST doesn't hand out most of these scholarships itself. Instead, it runs a scholarship provider listing — a searchable database of colleges, universities, companies, and organizations that have committed to funding FIRST students specifically. That listing spans more than 150 colleges, universities, companies, and organizations, with awards running well into the tens of millions of dollars — though the exact totals shift every year, so check the current numbers on the FIRST scholarships page.

You search that database, find scholarships you're eligible for, and then apply to each one directly through the provider — the college's financial aid office, the company's foundation, or the organization running it. FIRST is the matchmaker, not the bank. Each award has its own application, its own essay prompts, and its own deadline.

The awards range wildly. Some are one-time $500 or $1,000 grants. Others are renewable four-year packages, and a handful are effectively full rides at specific universities. Treat the small ones seriously anyway: three or four $1,000 scholarships stack into real textbook-and-housing money, and the small ones usually have fewer applicants.

You qualify just for being on a team

The single most important thing to understand is that a big portion of these scholarships are open to any current FIRST participant. No award required. No specific GPA in some cases. No "you must have designed the swerve modules." You're a student on a registered FRC (or FTC, or even FLL) team, and that's the entry ticket.

This matters because a lot of students assume scholarships are only for the standout kids — the captain, the CAD lead, the person who gave the big presentation. Not true. Providers fund FIRST students because the program itself is the credential. Showing up, contributing to a real engineering organization for a few years, and being able to write about it honestly is what they're looking for.

If you're brand new and not sure what "contributing" even looks like yet, our Getting Started guide walks through the departments and where beginners plug in. Every one of those roles — wiring, scouting, fundraising, media — is a legitimate story to tell on a scholarship application.

The kinds of scholarships you'll find

The listing sorts into a few broad buckets, and it helps to know which you're chasing.

College and university scholarships

Dozens of schools offer awards specifically for FIRST alumni who enroll there. Some are competitive; others are close to automatic if you meet the criteria and check the box on your application. Engineering-heavy schools have historically been the most generous here, but the list changes and expands, so search the current database rather than assuming which colleges participate. When you're building your college list senior year, cross-reference it against the FIRST providers — a school that gives FIRST students an extra few thousand dollars a year is worth a hard look.

Corporate and organization scholarships

Companies in tech, aerospace, manufacturing, and engineering fund a lot of these, often because they want to hire FIRST alumni down the road. Professional societies and regional STEM foundations chip in too. These are frequently national, meaning you can attend any college and still collect, which makes them some of the highest-value applications relative to effort.

Need-based versus merit-based

Both exist in the listing. Some ask for financial documents; others weigh grades, essays, and leadership. A few blend the two. Don't self-select out of need-based awards because you think your family "makes too much" — the thresholds vary, and it costs you nothing to apply and find out.

The FIRST Leadership Award (formerly the Dean's List)

If there's one FRC-specific award worth understanding for the college-application game, it's the FIRST Leadership Award — the honor FIRST called the Dean's List until it was renamed in 2025. It recognizes the program's most outstanding student leaders — the ones driving their team's technical work and community impact, not just their own robot skills.

Here's the mechanics: each team can nominate up to two students who still have at least one more year of FRC eligibility (in practice, sophomores and juniors). Those two nominees are the team's Semi-finalists; Finalists are then selected at FRC Regional events and District Championships, and a small group of Winners is named from the finalists at the FIRST Championship. Being named a Finalist or Winner is a genuine distinction that stands out on a college or scholarship application, and it gets you visibility with scholarship providers.

You can't apply for it yourself — your mentors nominate you — but you can absolutely earn it by being the person who takes ownership: leading a subteam, running the team's outreach, mentoring rookies. If you're aiming that direction, the work that gets you noticed overlaps heavily with the Impact Award side of the program and with running the team like a real organization, which our Business, Operations & Fundraising guide covers in depth.

It is not just for future engineers

A myth worth killing: FIRST scholarships are only for people majoring in mechanical or electrical engineering. Plenty of them are, but the listing also includes awards for students heading into business, communications, graphic design, computer science, culinary arts, education, and more. FIRST leans hard into the idea that a robotics team needs marketers, writers, and organizers as much as it needs machinists, and the scholarship pool reflects that.

So if you spent your FRC years running the team's social media, writing grant applications, or managing the budget, you have scholarships aimed at you too. Filter the database by field of study and you'll see.

How to actually find and apply

The process is straightforward, but it rewards students who start early and stay organized.

1. Go to the FIRST scholarships page and open the scholarship search — FIRST now hosts the provider listing on the Pearson Futures portal. Filter by the things that describe you — your state, your intended major, need-based versus merit, whether you're a current student or alum.
2. Build a spreadsheet. For every scholarship you might qualify for, log the provider, the award amount, the deadline, the essay prompts, and what documents it needs. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do, and almost nobody does it.
3. Read the eligibility fine print. Some scholarships require you to be a current participant, which means you have to apply while you're still on the team — usually senior year. Miss that window and the door closes.
4. Write about your FIRST experience concretely. The essays almost always ask about it. "I was on the robotics team" is weak. "I rewired our robot's CAN bus after it failed inspection, then wrote the checklist our whole electrical group now uses" is strong. Specifics win.
5. Apply directly to each provider by its own deadline. FIRST hands you the lead; you close it.

Keep receipts on what you actually did across your seasons. The student who kept a running log of their contributions writes better applications in an afternoon than the one trying to reconstruct three years from memory the night before a deadline.

A realistic timeline

The scholarship listing updates through the year, with a lot of activity in the fall and winter. Most deadlines land in the winter and spring of senior year, lining up with regular college applications, but some open earlier and a few key ones close before you might expect.

Underclassmen aren't off the hook. Sophomore and junior year is when you build the résumé — take on a real role, chase the FIRST Leadership Award nomination, keep your grades where merit awards need them. Then senior fall, you sit down with your spreadsheet and grind through applications while everyone else is only thinking about the Common App.

Mistakes that quietly cost students money

A few patterns show up every year:

• Assuming you're not "good enough" to apply. Participation-based scholarships don't care that you weren't the captain. Apply anyway.
• Only chasing the big ones. The $10,000 national awards have thousands of applicants. The $750 regional one from a local engineering firm might have a dozen. Do both.
• Ignoring your own college's FIRST scholarship. Students commit to a school without ever checking whether it offers FIRST alumni money. Check every school on your list.
• Waiting until it's too late. Current-participant scholarships expire when you graduate. Senior-year procrastination is the most expensive habit here.

Bottom line

FIRST scholarships are one of the most underused benefits of being on an FRC team. There's real money — tens of millions of dollars — sitting in a searchable database, a meaningful slice of it open to you just for showing up and contributing over a few seasons. The students who cash in aren't necessarily the best builders; they're the ones who searched the listing early, kept an organized spreadsheet, and wrote honestly about what they did.

Start now. Build the experience worth writing about, keep track of your contributions, and when the applications open, you'll be the one ready. If you're still finding your footing on a team, pick a department and start learning — browse the free LearnFRC guides or map out a learning path to build the kind of FRC story scholarship providers actually fund.