What happened to Going Merry?

What Going Merry was

Going Merry was a free scholarship platform built around one idea: students should not have to fill out the same form fifty times. You created one profile, the system matched you to awards based on the profile, and you submitted to many of those awards through a single application. Some partner colleges also pushed their institutional scholarships through the platform.

The company described its database as roughly five million scholarship listings. It was acquired by Earnest in 2021 and operated as a subsidiary until the 2026 shutdown.

What Going Merry did well was reduce application friction. What it never did, like every other free scholarship platform, was tell you whether the awards in its database were worth applying to in the first place.

The shutdown timeline

According to Earnest’s official notice on the company’s blog:

• Through March 5, 2026: students could complete and submit applications already in progress.
• After March 5, 2026: no new applications or edits accepted on the platform.
• End of March 2026: platform officially shut down.

Earnest did not publicly disclose the reason. The notice indicated user data would be handled by Earnest going forward and that scholarship administrators should be contacted directly for any pending or submitted applications.

What to do if you had applications in flight

Three priority moves, in order.

First,search your email for “Going Merry,” “scholarship application,” “deadline,” and your student’s name. Recover the names of every scholarship your kid had saved, started, or submitted.

Second,for each scholarship you find, search the actual provider directly. Most scholarships listed on Going Merry exist outside the platform. The provider’s own website is the source of truth for the current cycle’s deadline, requirements, and contact information.

Third,for any scholarship your student already submitted through Going Merry, contact the scholarship administrator directly. Earnest’s notice was explicit on this point: the platform no longer routes applications, so confirmation has to come from the scholarship provider.

The four-step rebuild

The temptation after Going Merry’s shutdown is to create accounts on every other free scholarship website and apply to as many awards as possible. Don’t. Volume was Going Merry’s value proposition, not yours.

Step 1: Rebuild your list from official provider sources.

Pull every scholarship your student had been pursuing. Search for each one directly. Verify the current cycle. If the provider page hasn’t been updated this year, email the provider before spending time on the application.

Step 2: Reconfirm every deadline at the source.

Saved screenshots, cached pages, and AI-generated lists are unreliable. Use the scholarship provider’s official page. If the page doesn’t confirm a current cycle, treat the award as unverified.

Step 3: Check each target school’s outside-scholarship policy.

This is the step most families skip and the one that actually decides whether a scholarship lowers the family’s bill. Outside scholarships can reduce a student’s institutional aid. The college decides what gets reduced and the answer varies. Some schools reduce loans first. Some reduce work-study. Some reduce institutional grants dollar-for-dollar. Two students can win the same $5,000 award and get completely different results depending on where they enroll.

For the full mechanics, see our guide on outside scholarship displacement.

Step 4: Rank by net impact, not headline amount.

A $1,500 local award with a short essay and strong fit beats a $20,000 national award with 100,000 applicants. A school-specific automatic merit award matters more than fifty outside scholarships. A scholarship that reduces loans helps your family. A scholarship that reduces institutional grants dollar-for-dollar may not lower the bill at all.

The question is not “how many scholarships can we find.” The question is “which awards are most likely to lower our final cost after school policy, deadline, fit, effort, and odds are considered.”

The mistake families make in week one

The biggest week-one mistake after Going Merry’s shutdown is treating discovery as the bottleneck. It isn’t. Bold.org, Fastweb, Scholarships.com, ScholarshipOwl, and your high school counseling portal still solve discovery and they still cost nothing. The bottleneck was always strategy: knowing which of those discovered scholarships were worth applying to, and which ones would quietly cancel out institutional aid your kid already had.

Going Merry didn’t solve that. Neither do the alternatives. That’s why the right replacement isn’t another free database.

A note for the next few months: scholarship scammers tend to chase displaced traffic. Be especially cautious of any “scholarship help” service or aggregator that solicits you in the weeks following the Going Merry shutdown. Our scholarship scams guide covers what to watch for.

Frequently asked questions