Stipend and Scholarship both are quite similar terms and have close meanings. Both are related to financial support during student life. Now Scholarship is an academic thing like you have a significant result from your courses, and the college is willingly giving you financial aid to cover your tuition fees. You can get a scholarship for many reasons, such as excellent academic results, poor economic conditions, or you are good at sports.
In contrast, a stipend doesn’t come from our educational institutes. Mostly it comes from your work as an employee in any company. But it’s not like a regular employee, you’ll not be hired for a job. You will do the job to enhance your practical skills and theoretical knowledge as a trainee or intern, and the company will give you respect, paying money, but not the same amount as an employee they hired.
So here, you will get the difference between Scholarship and stipend. I would love to release all of your confusion about the stipend, bursary, and fellowship.
Meaning of Scholarship and Stipend
Look, I know definition doesn’t really help all the time for similar things, but scholarships and stipends have a clear definition and no chance of getting flummoxed.
Scholarship
It is a financial grant aid for selected students in smoothing their further education. Every student doesn’t get a scholarship even though they apply for it.
Most of the time, students apply for scholarships on different criteria like academic merit, athlete, or financial aid. So if a student has an excellent academic result and applies for a scholarship, they have a good chance of getting it. But if a student applies for financial aid scholarship but they are not impoverished at all, then financial aid scholarship won’t be applicable to him/her.
Stipend
A stipend is a synonym of Scholarship and has a close but different meaning. Stipend means a fixed payment, yeah payment because you’ll get the money as payment as an allowance for your service during internship or apprentices.
Doesn’t it sound like a job? Surely it sounds like a job. But employers do not hire you as a permanent employee, and they give you the chance to achieve skills in any field. Now, this stipend comes when we graduate from college, and before getting our certificates or result, we apply for an internship.
During that time any company gives us opportunities and for our respect, they pay us an allowance which is lower than the permanent employers. So make no one confused saying stipend scholarship.
Read: Real Difference between Curriculum and Syllabus
Difference Between Scholarship and Stipend
Here, I would like to let you know the direct differences between stipend and Scholarship. It helps you to understand the terms, and whenever you will see the terms while applying for universities and colleges, things will never make you confused.
| Stipend | Scholarship |
| Money is paid to the interns for their monetary assistance. | It is a financial grant for brilliant, improvised students to encourage them. |
| The payment comes mostly monthly or one time after apprentices. | Most of the time, money comes annually or gets adjusted with tuition fees. |
| Taxable | Tax is not applicable |
| It is mostly for the students who finished their graduations or waiting for results to come. | For the students who are still studying in school, college or the undergraduates. |
| It covers living costs. | It covers tuition fees, research fees, etc. |
Sometimes people even get flummoxed when they try to find the difference between stipend and fellowship. Here, I’m shortly introducing you to the term fellowship. Fellowship is one kind of Scholarship that helps postgraduate students to pursue higher education like Ph.D. or research work. Either universities or any research institute is most likely to give a Fellowship for brilliant academic results or brilliant research work previously.
So stipend and fellowship are entirely different from Scholarship and stipend.
Difference Between Stipend and Salary
Stipend gets the intern students. On the other hand, salary is for the employee. I guess you already know this basic difference. Apart from this difference, there are a few differences that will erase all the confusions you have.
| Stipend | Salary |
| Purpose is to gain knowledge for our future career. | It is the career and salary money is for our living. |
| Paid to interns or apprentices. | Paid to employees. |
| It can be taxable or nontaxable both. | Taxable. |
| No increment. | Promotion in designation increases the salary. |
| It is the compensation for our work in the company. | Companies give us money to show a respect for interns. |
Stipend for Students
So you are a student and want to get a stipend while working part-time in an organization. For that, first, you may open an account in LinkedIn and then complete your profile with a proper description of your graduation subject and what sort of job you are looking to do.
Then LinkedIn will automatically notify you about a job or internship with a stipend. This is how mostly we get to know apprentice job opportunities with stipends. A stipend for college students is not tough to find in this modern era. All you need is to be active on social media’s job and internship pages.
Some organizations require a stipend scholarship application because they take so many apprentices at a time and don’t give stipends to all of them. You must meet their conditions for this kind of organization to have the stipend.
FAQ
Do colleges give stipends?
Yeah, college stipend is a term totally similar to a Scholarship. If you can satisfy all the criteria in a college and get a scholarship, you’ll be rewarded with a stipend as long as you can satisfy the criteria.
Are stipends paid to students taxable?
Most of the cases, stipends are not taxable but still, if the stipend money is so much and the organization is well known, in that case, sometimes stipends are taxable.
What’s the difference between a scholarship and grant?
Grant is a kind of Scholarship, but it gets approved because of the extreme financial need of a student. While Scholarship mostly depends on academic merit.
Final Note
The summary of this discussion is Scholarship and stipend both the terms indicate having money as a reward. Sometimes we see advertisements for different universities and see they are saying a stipend is available. In that case, read the description of the stipend.
It is really a stipend if they require you to do any job for them as an apprentice. And if you find out that they will subsidize you for excellent results or financial need, then they are using the term stipend as a Scholarship.
