Moving Beyond the Paper Check: Recapping Our Webinar with Flywire

In our recent webinar, Scholarship America and Flywire explored a shared vision for the future of scholarship payments, and why it’s time to retire the paper check. As the nation’s largest nonprofit scholarship administrator, the scale behind this vision is significant. Scholarship America has distributed more than $6 billion to over 3.5 million students throughout our history, including $337 million to more than 100,000 students in 2025 alone across 1,350+ scholarship programs. Yet today, that work still relies on more than 110,000 paper checks issued each year.

Together, Scholarship America and Flywire are working to replace those paper checks with secure electronic ACH payments—a change that benefits everyone involved. For institutions, ACH means faster processing, simpler reconciliation, and greater security. For students, it means scholarship funds can reach their schools more quickly, helping reduce delays that can affect billing, registration, and peace of mind.

The webinar introduced our new partnership and the launch of a digital Scholarship Disbursements solution designed to help colleges and universities receive scholarship funds faster, more securely, and with far less administrative work. We share an ambitious goal with Flywire: eliminating paper scholarship payments entirely by 2030, with the new electronic workflow ready in time for the Fall 2026 term.

For school administrators, bursars, and financial aid officers, the hassle of paper checks is all too familiar. Checks arrive by mail, must be matched to students manually, and can delay registration, billing, or refunds while institutions wait for funds to arrive. The new solution streamlines that process from end to end. During the webinar, we highlighted several key benefits:

Aggregated digital delivery. Instead of receiving hundreds of individual paper checks, institutions receive scholarship payments as a single daily ACH deposit—eliminating mail delays and speeding access to funds.

Simplified reconciliation. Every disbursement includes student and program details, making it easier to post payments accurately and reduce manual work.

Greater visibility and security. A centralized dashboard provides real-time payment tracking, replacing the uncertainty of wondering whether a check has arrived.

Enhanced security. End-to-end encrypted payment delivery helps reduce the fraud and loss risks associated with physical checks.

Perhaps best of all, there is no cost for institutions to receive scholarship funds through the platform.

One reason this solution can be implemented quickly is that Flywire isn’t starting from scratch. The Scholarship America partnership builds on the same technology Flywire uses to process 529 college savings plan disbursements, delivering more than $9 billion in electronic tuition payments to over 800 institutions.

In both cases, the challenge is the same: paper checks are slow, difficult to reconcile, and prone to delays. The solution is also the same—a secure, fully digital payment and reconciliation process that integrates directly with institutions’ student information systems.

Flywire’s existing higher education network further accelerates adoption. The company serves nearly 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities and supports the vast majority of Title IV institutions, meaning much of the infrastructure is already in place.

We’re rolling this out with Flywire through the remainder of 2026 and into 2027, with the goal of having scholarship payments fully electronic by 2030. Institutions that want to receive scholarship funds faster, reduce back-office work, and cut fraud risk can start preparing now for the Fall 2026 term.

Ready to learn more? Watch the full webinar recording on the Flywire website here.