Lindsey Zolp is one of two students at Loyola University Chicago getting an unusual scholarship. But it’s not in connection with her softball play, her education degree or her sorority.

She’s getting about half of her tuition covered simply by virtue of her last name. It’s one of the more challenging scholarships Loyola awards each year, says Ed Moore, the school’s scholarship director.

The scholarship is common knowledge among many Zolps, Lindsey Zolp says, which is how she found out about it.

“My cousin who was also an elementary education major, she went here and she took advantage of the scholarship,” Zolp says.

Many universities have similarly obscure scholarships that leave officials constantly searching for eligible students.

While almost every university offer scholarships based on majors, sports or other interests, many schools also have to find ways to dole out cash with more stringent qualifications.

When university development offices get calls from donors wanting to set up endowed scholarships, they try to work with the donors to make the scholarships open to as many students as possible, says Meg Glick, DePaul’s scholarship director.

“The more specific it gets, the harder it is to award,” she says.

Glick uses the example of a donor wanting his scholarship to be given to students of a particular nationality. DePaul doesn’t necessarily collect that information on each of its students, so there’s no easy way to find who among the school’s 20,000 students would qualify.

“What we do say to them is basically, ‘There’s a possibility your scholarship will go unspent,’” Glick says.

Glick declined to say which scholarships DePaul has difficulty awarding each year because she does not want to offend donors. However, she says several scholarships are especially difficult to match.

She says such scholarships amount to a very small proportion of the money DePaul hands out each year.

At Loyola, the Zolp scholarship can only be matched to a Zolp.

In the 1970s, a retired Catholic priest named William Zolp, who had loose connections to Loyola but never graduated from or taught there, created the endowed scholarship. Moore says it can only be given to students baptized and raised Catholic whose last name is the same as the priest’s.

To verify that, school officials must check a student’s birth certificate and baptismal certificate to make sure they qualify, Moore says. Finding students eligible for the scholarship, which can be $6,000 or more in a year, can be tricky.

“It kind of goes in cycles where some of the families know each other, or they’re related (to Fr. Zolp),” Moore says.