If education changed your life – or you’ve seen financial barriers hold others back – you might want to consider a donor-advised fund (DAF), which can be a flexible, organized giving engine to expand access through a focused education strategy.

With a single contribution, you can establish a dedicated giving vehicle, recommend grants and support students in a way that both reflects your values and honors your family’s legacy. When paired with a thoughtfully designed scholarship program, a DAF allows you to move from writing checks to building a durable platform for talent, access and upward mobility.

“Many clients want to support education for underprivileged children and young adults, but often experience analysis/paralysis, and feel overwhelmed about where to give,” said Brad Fine, wealth advisor with the Hamline Fine Group, J.P. Morgan Wealth Management. “A DAF is a great first step. Clients can contribute now – partner with our team on refining a giving strategy – and recommend grants as they see fit.”

Scholarships are uniquely powerful because they operate at the intersection of aspiration and constraint: Indeed, a capable student’s academic trajectory can hinge on a gap in tuition, books, housing or unpaid internship costs. Using a DAF to fund scholarships lets you focus your philanthropy on real outcomes – who is helped, how selection aligns with your personal mission and what success looks like – while leveraging experienced partners to handle eligibility rules, application workflows, award disbursement and compliance. The result is often a program that is more scalable and less administratively burdensome than a bespoke approach, without sacrificing the personal touch that makes scholarship giving so meaningful.

Whether your goal is to expand access for first-generation students, strengthen a profession you’ve built your career in or invest in a community that shaped you, a DAF-backed scholarship strategy can be structured to endure across market cycles and generations. With these key design choices, governance considerations and practical steps in mind, you can help ensure your scholarship philanthropy is impactful, compliant and built to last.

Why you should consider a DAF scholarship program

Typically, you can’t use your DAF to give scholarships directly to students. Most DAF sponsors, including National Philanthropic Trust, do not allow grants that go directly to individuals (including students) because it can be seen as intentionally benefiting someone and raise regulatory concerns.

Instead, the typical approach is to grant to a qualified public charity – often a school, university foundation or scholarship-administering nonprofit – that then awards scholarships through its own process. The charity must retain full discretion and control over scholarship selection and payments.

While you can often provide nonbinding input – such as scholarship purpose, general criteria and populations served – you typically cannot:

• Select recipients
• Sit on the selection committee in a controlling way (i.e. have majority vote)
• Direct the charity to award to a named person or small pre-identified group

You can usually name the scholarship after yourself, your family or someone else (e.g., the “Smith Family Scholarship”), as long as the arrangement doesn’t provide more than incidental benefits.

Deciding where to use your DAF

If you have strong ties to your alma mater, you can often use your DAF to fund scholarships there, if you grant to the institution or to its 501(c)(3) foundation and the institution controls the scholarship program.

“The flexibility of a DAF allowed our client to make a large year-end gift for tax planning and later work with his alma mater to launch a named scholarship,” said Steve Soja, wealth partner of Soja West Group at J.P. Morgan Wealth Management.

You can even use your DAF to pay tuition at a private K–12 school, but this arrangement can be more complicated. In fact, many DAF sponsors restrict K–12 tuition assistance because of heightened concern for potential private benefit. If this use is allowed, the scholarship program must be structured and administered by a qualified charity with clear, charitable selection criteria and independence.

Designing your scholarship’s criteria

While you’ll have some leeway when it comes to building your scholarship, there are some limitations to bear in mind. You can often use geographic or community-based criteria (e.g., hometown, county, specific school district).

You can also require objective, charitable criteria, such as financial need, demonstrated academic interest, intended field of study, first-generation or underrepresented status, record of community service, specific grade point average and so on. Criteria that are overly narrow or designed to benefit a preselected person or class can be problematic.

You can’t use DAF grants to confer a private benefit on disqualified persons – including yourself, family members and controlled entities – or to steer funds to friends or associates. Most sponsors will prohibit any arrangement that could benefit a donor’s family. Nor can you use DAF funds to pay for tickets, event tables or admissions, or for sponsorships that provide a more-than-incidental benefit. If you attend an event, pay the personal portion separately (and consult your sponsor on the rules).

DAF scholarship money can cover travel, laptops or living expenses only if the charity’s scholarship policy treats these as qualified educational expenses and administers them properly. The charity – not the donor – decides what expenses are covered and how payments are made.

You can also support mentoring programs, but you’ll have to avoid arrangements that suggest the scholarship is tied to employment, guaranteed internships or benefits to your business. If you want your scholarship to have an internship component, the charity should design it independently and make the opportunity broadly available.

To ensure the scholarship stays aligned with your goals, or “donor intent,” you can often specify the following:

• The scholarship’s purpose (e.g., STEM focus, nursing students, community leadership)
• Target population, within charitable limits
• Reporting cadence, such as annual updates

You generally cannot, however, impose restrictions that remove the charity’s discretion or create an enforceable personal benefit.

Given education privacy laws, many charities can provide only aggregate reporting, such as number of awards, total dollars, school distribution and impact narratives. They can’t share personally identifying student information without consent.

The bottom line

A DAF can be a powerful way to support education - especially when it’s paired with a scholarship program run by a qualified public charity. Because DAFs generally can’t make grants directly to individuals, the most durable approach is to fund an independent scholarship process where the charity retains full discretion over selection and payments. With clear, charitable criteria and the right governance guardrails, you can translate your giving goals into meaningful student outcomes all while keeping the program scalable, compliant and built to last.