Grades
Selection
Admission
Deadline: October 1, 2026, 11:59pm Pacific. This is the earliest major deadline of the year, four weeks before the first Early Action wall.
QuestBridge matches high-achieving students from low-income households with full four-year scholarships at 55 partner colleges — among them Stanford, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Amherst and Rice. A Match scholarship covers tuition, housing, food and fees. There is no parent contribution and there are no loans.
The award is worth more than $360,000 over four years. There is no other single application in senior year with that expected value.
QuestBridge does not publish a hard income cut-off, but Finalists typically come from households under roughly $65,000 a year with limited assets. If your family is near or under that, apply. The application is long, and it is still the highest-return work available to you this autumn.
Nothing here is reusable from the Common App without rewriting. Budget real weeks, not evenings.
Ranking a college is binding. If you match, you must attend, and every other application is withdrawn. Rank only colleges you would attend without hesitation, in true preference order. A family that ranks a school it is unsure about and matches has no way out.
Nothing is lost. Most QuestBridge applicants apply to the same colleges through the regular process, and the essays you have written are the strongest possible starting material for those applications. Finalists who do not match are also released to apply Regular Decision, often with the college already having read the file.
Create a free account to track all 243 admission tasks with personalized deadlines for Senior Year.
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