Students who are heading to college can find scholarships from a wide variety of sources, but did you ever expect to see one from Amazon? The Amazon Student scholarship uses all of the usual criteria to select its winners: GPA, extracurricular activities, and test scores. It’s also only open to members of Amazon Student, the version of Amazon Prime meant to hook college students.

There are apparently fifty scholarships available to full-time students at accredited not-for-profit colleges in the United States. The other part of Amazon’s offering of cash to college students is much simpler than accepting scholarship applications: they’re offering ten bucks each to students who convince their friends to sign up for the Student program.

Originally, Amazon Student was free for as long as customers were on college, and offered a limited set of Prime benefits to students. Now the plan is a little bit different: students can still receive those limited benefits for free for six months, which include free 2-day shipping, but not streaming video, music, or the all-you-can-read Kindle library. After six months, Amazon Student members have to pay up for the regular Prime program, but at half price. For that, they receive the full set of Prime benefits.

Amazon Student Scholarship [Amazon]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.