<p>At most colleges, do you have to apply for scholarships or are you already in the running by applying to school?</p>
<p>It depends on the school, but typically a lot of private schools will have earlier dealines for scholarships. For example, USC lists online that its deadline is in January, but if you actually take time to do some research, you would find out that that’s the deadline for general admission. The date for merit scholarships is actually December 1st.</p>