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College Students: Make Money by Getting Good Grades

Kyle Taylor is a blogger at The Penny Hoarder. Check out his blog to get 100’s of weird and wacky ways to make extra money.

For many college students, money is tight. They might dig through the couch cushions to find entertainment money or return their pop bottles and cans for a deposit refund to pay for books. Other desperate students find side gigs as babysitters, or on campus as work study students.

If you are a college student living on a tight income (or you know someone who is), the best way to make money and still have enough time to go to school is to do a variety of side jobs.

However, recently a few companies have offered college students financial incentive to get good grades. How sweet is that? College students can earn money doing what they are supposed to do–study and do well in school.

Interested? Here are some companies that are offering this program:


GradeFund doesn’t exactly give a college student money for getting good grades, but they offer an incentive. The student sets a goal for the grades she would like to achieve in a particular course or semester, and then the student must find sponsors to pay her if she achieves her goals. Sponsors can be family members (hello parents!), friends, or even corporate sponsors.

Why would a corporation want to sponsor a student and encourage her to get good grades? It is not entirely altruistic. The corporation often uses a site like GradeFund to encourage students to take a particular path in their education. They may even hire some of the students they sponsor when they graduate, according to Mashable.


Ultrinsic can also monetarily reward college students with good grades, but their approach is different than GradeFund. Rather than sponsors, Ultrinsic asks students to register, and then, based on several factors, Ultrinsic offers the student a wager of the possibility of the student getting a certain grade in a certain course.

While some may frown on this as gambling, others say it just provides an incentive for students to achieve good grades.


Yes, that is right, some colleges pay their students for good grades. A few community colleges in Louisiana experimented with paying their students for good grades. The students in the study had to go to school at least half-time and maintain a C or better GPA. In return, they could earn up to $1,000 over two terms.

While this was a pilot program, several other colleges have explored this option, so if a student attends a college that pays, they could get a very sweet reward in addition to good grades.


You may think the days of getting paid to earn good grades ended when mom and dad stopped paying you a few bucks for every A or B you earned. However, now you can find other businesses and colleges willing to pay you for good grades. Sure, these programs won’t give you spending money for the whole semester, but they do offer another way to make some extra bucks, which may mean less you have to take out on student loans.

3 responses to “College Students: Make Money by Getting Good Grades”

  1. Shaneka Jones

    Different and nicely done

  2. Jordan Rodriguez

    Never even heard of this. Definitely going to research it some more for my blogs on student savings. Great find!

  3. Simon

    Now this is interesting. Wish I knew this a couple of years back I’d have probably made a small fortune especially on the wager site! Nothing better than proving someone flat wrong :)

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