For college-bound students, the obvious benefits of volunteering include building qualifications to improve the odds for college admission, feeling good as a contributor to community-minded organizations, and learning the value of helping others. But there is an important additional benefit to volunteering: Earning significant scholarships.

While the criteria for selecting scholarships winners for merit-based scholarships is academic achievement and for need-based scholarships is student financial need, local and regional scholarships traditional use the quality of student’s community service as criteria for selecting winners. Factors evaluated during local scholarship competitions include the quality of submitted essays, how well students interview in front of scholarship selection committees, and students’ grade point average. But it’s the quality of community service that usually puts a student over the top to actually win a local scholarship.

Here’s a real-life example of how a student got “paid” for volunteering. A recent high school graduate was a student volunteer at a hospital during her senior year for two hours per week for 40 weeks. She applied for the local Hospital Auxiliary Scholarship and won a $2,000 scholarship. In effect, she earned an untaxed wage of $25 per hour ($2,000 / 80 hours) as well as excellent credentials that helped her get accepted to her top choice university.

This summer poses unusual difficulties for high school students to find jobs due to the current economic downturn. However, thinking long-term to the spring of your senior year and the potential to earn scholarships from local and regional scholarships is a great reason to volunteer this summer (and throughout your high school career). Preferably, your volunteer activities should support your student theme as part of the Junior Year Admission Strategy or Senior Year Application Strategy, but commitment to any type of volunteer work is beneficial to all college-bound students.

Don’t miss the opportunity to volunteer this summer; you may end up earning thousands of dollars for doing so.