Scholarship Scraper Actor

An Apify Actor that automatically scrapes structured scholarship data from multiple online databases to help students find financial aid opportunities.

Overview

This actor collects scholarship information from several major platforms, including Scholarships.com, FastWeb, and the College Board. It performs searches based on configurable criteria and returns detailed, consistent data for each scholarship.

Key Features

• Multi-Source Scraping: Collects data from several scholarship platforms simultaneously.
• Structured Output: Returns clean, well-formatted JSON data for easy processing.
• Configurable Filters: Narrow searches by country, education level, field of study, and minimum award amount.
• Robust Operation: Includes error handling, logging, and efficient parallel processing.
• Flexible Export: Results can be exported to various formats via Apify datasets.

How to Use

Running the Actor

Run the actor with default parameters using the Apify CLI:

apify run

Input Parameters

Control the actor's behavior by providing a JSON input object. Key parameters include:

• search_query (string): Search terms to filter scholarships (default: "scholarship").
• maxScholarships (integer): Maximum number of scholarships to scrape, between 1 and 1000 (default: 50).
• country (string): Filter by country (e.g., "USA", "Canada").
• minAmount (number): Minimum scholarship amount in USD.
• educationLevel (string): Filter by level ("High School", "Undergraduate", "Graduate", "Postdoctoral").
• fieldOfStudy (string): Filter by academic discipline.

Example Input:

{
  "search_query": "STEM scholarships",
  "maxScholarships": 100,
  "country": "USA",
  "minAmount": 1000,
  "educationLevel": "Undergraduate",
  "fieldOfStudy": "Engineering"
}

Input & Output

Output Data Schema

The actor outputs an array of scholarship objects, each containing the following fields:

Setup & Deployment

Install Dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Deploy to Apify Console:

apify push

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• Apify SDK for Python
• Web scraping libraries (BeautifulSoup4, requests, Playwright)

Performance

The actor scrapes sources in parallel. Execution time scales with the maxScholarships parameter and the complexity of the search filters.