You may not have given it much thought, but the next time you buy an Impossible Whopper meal, you may be helping a local student pay their college tuition. That’s because Burger King, along with many other brands—a list that includes Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, and tons of others—have incorporated scholarships into their broader marketing strategies. 

In all, it amounts to millions of dollars filtering down from corporate America to students’ pockets. With student debt levels amounting to more than $1.7 trillion as of early 2024, students are likely happy to get money any way they can, and scholarships remain a popular way to apply for funding. While average college costs have eclipsed $36,000 per year, the average scholarship clocks in at around $7,800 per year according to data from Bankrate. Even a sizable scholarship may only feel like a drop in the bucket for some students.

But that has opened the door for brands, eager to earn goodwill and name recognition among younger consumers. And it’s a tactic that smaller companies may increasingly start taking advantage of as well.

How corporate scholarships work

On the surface, giving money away seems at odds with most corporate goals, particularly in an era of ubiquitous cost-cutting measures and mass layoffs. But some brands take their scholarship programs seriously, and have created parallel foundations to help facilitate them.

“I think of it as a way to serve our communities, as a way of giving back,” says Katie Repici, executive director of the Burger King Foundation, which operates as a nonprofit and was founded in 2005 as a way to honor Burger King cofounder Jim McLamore’s strong support of education. “For us, it’s about legacy.”

The foundation, Repici says, gives out around 4,000 scholarships each year of varying amounts, and in all, has awarded around 50,000 over the past couple of decades.

A majority of the program’s funding comes from coupon and “round-up” campaigns—which is when a cashier or kiosk asks a customer if they’d like to round up their purchase price to the nearest dollar, for example, to support the program—and raises millions of dollars for scholarships each year. The program is incorporated by the roughly 6,700 Burger King locations around the country, and the money raised by each location “stays with scholars in that community,” Repici says.

In other words, the money you round up when you buy a Whopper at a local Burger King should eventually support a local student’s scholarship. It’s proven effective over the years, giving students across the country scholarships of at least $1,000. And anyone can apply, too.

“It’s blossomed into a really lovely cause,” Repici says.

It’s not just large brands that are giving back through scholarships. Medium-sized companies like Cards Against Humanity, which created a self-described “party game for horrible people,” has a scholarship program that offers “a full-tuition scholarship for women and nonbinary students in science, technology, engineering, or math.”

The Science Ambassador Scholarship, as the program is called, is more targeted than the Burger King Foundation’s scholarships, and was created with a goal of changing the public’s perception of scientists, according to Maria Ranahan, the program’s executive director.

And it’s made an impact. “To date, we’ve awarded nine full-tuition scholarships, given out over $50,000 in one-time tuition stipends, and created a vast network of women and non-binary STEM students and professionals,” Ranahan says.

“The scholarship certainly has a marketing component to it,” she adds, but overall the program allows those at Cards Against Humanity to support and pursue collaborations and “passion projects.”

“Perhaps it contributes to the long-term success of our company, but to us, projects like the Science Ambassador Scholarship and our other charitable endeavors are a big part of the purpose of building a successful company with a wide audience,” Ranahan says.

Marketing meets the student debt crisis

The idea of businesses utilizing scholarships as a marketing tool may have a whiff of impurity to it. But in the end, it’s better that some money is making its way out of corporate coffers and into the hands of needy students, says Cait Lamberton, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and co-editor of the Journal of Marketing.

“Increasingly, consumers expect corporations to pick up some pieces where other social services are failing,” Lamberton says, pointing to the student debt crisis. But “I don’t think we’d consider this unethichical—we want to see that a firm, if they’re being responsive to vulnerability in a society, that the actions they’re taking are not increasing that vulnerability.”

And when it comes to corporate scholarships, “firms are responding to a vulnerability [the student debt crisis] in a way that may reduce that vulnerability over the long term,” she adds.

As such, these programs are a net positive for society, even if they are connected with marketing and PR efforts. Those efforts, she says, are really aimed at the college-aged cohort—Gen Z—in an attempt to make younger consumers feel more connected to brands.

It’s difficult to say how successful these programs are at fostering that connection, but it likely doesn’t hurt, especially for brands that have suffered PR snafus in the past, or have otherwise alienated a portion of their customer base—especially younger consumers. “For free money, people will set aside their emotional concerns,” Lamberton says.

Reaching Gen Z

While big brands have utilized or fostered corporate scholarship programs for decades, such programs may soon become more common among small businesses, too. ScholarshipOwl, a company that connects brands and students to help them find scholarship opportunities, is increasingly working with small businesses and brands to help create and promote scholarships and connect with Gen Zers on the hunt for college funding.

“We help students win scholarships, and help brands win the next generation of customers,” says David Tabachnikov, CEO of ScholarshipOwl. “Many companies have been giving out scholarships for a long time, but the thing is, to create a scholarship, promote it, and reach Gen Z, you need to handle the selection, the legal part—there’s a lot to handle,” he says.

That whole process has prevented smaller companies without the resources of large corporations from creating scholarships of their own. But new tools and services, like those offered by ScholarshipOwl, are making it easier.

“If you’re a local car wash, you probably never thought about it,” Tabachnikov says. But he adds that now, small businesses can create scholarships in similar fashion—and with the relative ease—that’s involved with creating a Google ad or Facebook ad campaign. 

In effect, platforms like ScholarshipOwl make it so that small businesses looking to put together a scholarship program benefiting local students with relatively small awards no longer need a legal team to help them navigate the back-end, or a large marketing team to promote it. Accordingly, with barriers to entry lowered, he anticipates that more and more brands will lean into scholarships as a marketing tool—taking a cue from larger organizations.

Looking forward, Tabachnikov says that the ability to create scholarships can be a boon for small businesses, especially as they’re trying to connect with Gen Z—which are notoriously difficult to nail down as a consumer set. 

“Brands don’t really have a way to reach them,” he says. “They aren’t watching TV, they’re browsing with ad blockers . . . and yet, they’re the biggest future consumer segment. The brands that catch them? They gain customers for a very long time.”

“Scholarships are one of the few ways to actually reach them,” he says.