I would do 5 $4K to spead it out.

Or maybe a scholarship for an older divorced parent looking to improve her qualifications. Most scholarships seem focused on twelfth grade applicants.

How about an award for a teen mother working hard to improve her education and her child's future? When I look at some of these young women, they have had to grow up fast and may be more focused than other teens rolling onto grade 13 (ie college) without any particular aim yet.

If it's a one time award, a $5000 award could allow a student to do an unpaid internship for a non-profit organization. It could pay for a student's summer, subsidize or pay for a room if the unpaid internship is out of town, out of state, etc. Internships for juniors and seniors are more critical than for freshmen and sophomores, as these could potentially lead to jobs out of college. And if it's unpaid for whatever reason, e.g., a non-profit organization, arts, music, and sciences, the money will be well used. I even heard CalTech summer SURF or Wave research programs where students have to secure outside funding in order to participate.

+1 on not as many scholarships for students already in college who may have been given a one time scholarship graduating from high school. I was given a $10K scholarship my junior year for senior year back in the early '90s. It was related to my field, but it really helped out as my parents only paid a minimum amount ($8K) as they were MC, but the cost of college kept rising the 4 years I was there. It allowed me to do an internship one quarter in DC on the Hill despite all the loans I had to take out. Another friend received a $5K scholarship for senior year. I would think four $5K scholarships or 2 $10K would make the most impact.

The small $1000 scholarships are nice, but with the cost of everything these days, the real impact would be a slightly larger scholarship they will remember. I had a couple of those small scholarships going into Freshmen year that I don't even remember now, but the two I do remember is the $10K one for senior year and a National Merit Scholarship for $5K every year of college as long as my grades didn't drop below some minimum average (can't remember what it was as I never came close to it).

Doesn't your fund advisor have access to the research on this? Who are you using?

^ ouch. Failure to proofread, my apologies.

How about a summer before college transition scholarship for poor/homeless student? I think middle class students have buffers that help succeed even when paying for college is tight. The poor don’t have the experience to do well sometimes even if fully funded before they don’t know how to manage the expectations. Another thought that you might consider that is not a scholarship to individuals, but would still help many would be to fund a food pantry at a college associated with the donor/organization.

I definitely would try to help more than a couple of people per year, so I agree that 4-10 scholarships per year sounds like a good idea. But I agree that freshmen get more one-time awards so it might be good to make the awards renewable (at least for another year, if not more).
I personally would make it available to anyone rather than shut out any student who isn't very low income. College is shockingly expensive for middle class folks. Whatever you decide, thank you for considering this idea! What a wonderful idea to give back in this way.

I'll leave the STEM vs Humanities discussion for another time.

"4 5K scholarships would help you reach 4 students per year."

Don't know if that is the right distribution or not but:

Will the scholarship be a one time award or will it be renewable?

While $5k seems like a good chunk of change, how elaborate will the application be?

Will it be a shortened version of the common app or will you have students write an essay specifically for the scholarship?

So many questions...

I think there are lots of one time awards for graduating HS seniors. I think you should consider college/university based scholarships for college juniors.

You could pick 4 college departments that mean something to family members. A $5k award winter/spring of junior year would give students flexibility with internships.

One option is to give to your fav alma mater since they have a system in place.

STEM gets enough support. What's needed is support for serious students in important Humanities fields that seek truth and foster critical thinking. 4 5K scholarships would help you reach 4 students per year.

I would do 2 $10,000 scholarships for students with high financial need attending HBCUs. I would want to fund students with a higher GPA 3.3+ but wouldn't look at SATs ( because they are less predictive of success in college and more predictive of family resources). I've seen several students this year who were high achievers who wanted to attend Howard, Morehouse, and Spellman respectively. But, HBCU tend to offer very little institutional aid.

Some schools have funds that allow kids to take unpaid internships (so it might cover their airfare to the city or rent/food while living there). Right now, unpaid internships are a luxury that upper income kids can use to open doors. Lower income kids have to work at paid jobs, often unrelated to their career aspirations. Similarly, perhaps you could sponsor the extra expenses associated with study abroad, such as airfare. I am thinking of opportunities that enhance a young person's formative/college years, but which are more accessible to upper income kids right now.

I am on the board of a family foundation that is being funded to give smaller donations to various other charitable organizations. We want to pivot and focus primarily on higher education or some other educational need. Is there something that is most needed in education funding and resources? One thought is to give college scholarships in support of a specific "mission". We also want to use our platform to share information and access on to other resources related to this focus..

There are currently scholarships and organizations with eligibility based on Financial Need, Women in STEM, Minorities in Higher Education, Women in Business, Community Service, Merit-based, etc. We can focus on these or anything else - those that want to make a change? those with high standardized scores? those with musical talent? kids from a specific geographic area? (We are in VA but have ties to NC, SC, and GA.)

If we have $20k to distribute per year, what is a meaningful scholarship amount? Is it best to give two $10k scholarships or a $1000 scholarship to 20 people? One thought is that there are already resources for students that are lower income. If someone qualified for a larger government or institutional grant received our smaller donation, it would just diminish the amount of the the larger grant and not really help.... that the most benefit would be to someone more in the "donut hole" income category. However, any scholarship would be given to school in the name of the individuals, not to the students directly (so would help with college expenses and not be for personal use.)

Summary:
I would just love some general advice for how to allocate funds of our family foundation. Our current passion is higher education, but we want it to be more narrowly focused. We are very fortunate to have the resources to share and want to make a meaningful impact to a few students.