One of the most famous stories Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote was “The Red-Headed League.” In it, Sherlock Holmes uncovered a strange case regarding a man who was handsomely paid to sit in a lonely office and basically do nothing…only because he had a perfect head of red hair. Well, that was fiction. Quite frankly, truth can be even stranger, especially when it comes to getting financial aid for an online college course.

When on the scholarship and grant hunt, one almost always thinks of the Pell Grant or such programs as becoming a Rhodes Scholar. These are based on such basics as financial need and or scholastic excellence. Yet the human race does have its share of peculiarities. While tales of dowagers leaving their considerable estate to their cats is not unheard of, there are others who will leave educational aid to blondes. That’s right, blondes.

One of the funnier web sites out there is called Mental Floss. It collects all kinds of strange trivia that can sometimes is plain amusing, other times absolutely confounding. One that sits comfortably in the latter category is a list of ten very weird scholarship funds. The information site even went the extra mile to double check their legitimacy.

The list includes $1,000 for an essay about being tall. This is balanced by another $1,000 for people with dwarfism. Another organization will match the first two with another $1,000 for being left-handed. Yet these three pale compared to the rest of the list.

The big ticket item is a $10,000 scholarship from the Ayn Rand Foundation for the best annual essay on one of her books. One doesn’t know if this is the ultimate endorsement for what she called “selfism” or the ultimate rejection of her hatred of all forms of altruism. Then, there are the ones that SOUND like they’re too strange to be true, but are.

Among the other grants is the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance, the American Nudist Society, and one for twins or parents of twins. Still, the ones that take the cake are a linguistic scholarship for the advancement of the Klingon language (beam that one up Star Trek fans), duck calling and 200 full tuition scholarships for being a golf caddy. The last one makes one wonder if Tiger Woods is a contributor. He can afford it, after all.

It should come as no surprise that many of these scholarship programs sit around unclaimed. Apparently many of them do so for years. The only thing that probably is stranger than the program itself is the person who goes out and claims the one for duck calling.

Still, they do exist and funding for online college course degree programs is funding. The world’s leading search engine, Google, even has a special category for scholarships online and it’s filled with a number of interesting facts on how to get them. When you think about the high cost of education these days, polishing up on one’s Klingon or duck calling ends up not sounding so strange after all.

Return to Educational Resources