Are you thinking about establishing a scholarship that will be given to someone after you pass away?
This could be an excellent philanthropic venture to include in your estate plan but you need the support of an experienced estate planning attorney to understand how to incorporate this appropriately and how to ensure that your individual goals are accomplished as it relates to giving a scholarship to a certain person. 
One option is to use a trust for the purpose of providing a scholarship but although a trust can be used, it is often not the most popular vehicle. One common reason to use a trust for the purpose of a scholarship one is because it has a great deal of flexibility. However, a trust can be very expensive to set up and depending on the cost of the trustee, it could be more cost effective to administer, and it is certainly less expensive than the work involved in setting up a tax-exempt foundation. Look through other existing options before you set up a trust. A consultation with an estate planning lawyer can help you to clarify what you want to achieve. An individual school like a specific high school could be a regular recipient from which they select from a pool of students every single year. The school might already have an established program to handle such a scholarship. Many colleges have plan giving departments that can also assist with setting up scholarships for attending and incoming students. Another thing to use is a community foundation.
Community foundations might already exist in your state that are fully equipped to handle the needs of establishing a scholarship account. In all of these situations, it is worthwhile to consider other estate planning tools that you might be able to use to accomplish your individual desires.
Your Pasadena estate planning lawyer is there to answer your questions.
