The truth about IB scholarships

If you are thinking of going into the IB program because you heard there are lots of scholarships to be had, you have been misled and I think that the IBO is doing some of the misleading. The newest list of IB scholarships, for instance, lists every college in Florida. I have scoured a bunch of their web sites and I can’t find anything about “IB scholarships” at any of them. In fact UF’s site specifically disputes this.

What IBO means, as the UF site indicates, is just Bright Futures Scholarships, which have different provisions for IB students. These different provisions, as I see them, are merely legislative safeguards so that IB students can still get the Bright Futures scholarships they would have gotten anyway had they not been in IB. To call them “IB Scholarships” borders on disingenuous. To put it another way, if you ask any IB student, I think they will tell you that an IB diploma is the hardest way to get a Bright Futures scholarship.