How to Get a Full Ride Scholarship as an International Student

[Music] so today I want to talk about how you can get a full right scholarship as an international student or in other words how you can study in America for free so hi there I'm William and I'm originally from South Africa I actually came to America in 2013 as an international student and I started out at a community college so I went to the Community College for about 3 years before transferring to a 4-year University and when I transferred to this 4-year University I actually got a full ride scholarship so now today I want to teach you how you can do the same without the need of firstly going to Community College because I only learned about this during my threeyear stay at Community College so this is going to save you a lot of time and effort as you start preparing and figuring out how you can Finance your studies in America so you're going to be looking for schools that offer full need financial aid so that means that a school is committed to covering 100% of your demonstrated Financial need now basic terms what that means is if you have no money to study the school will give you all the money that you need in order to study at that institution so what that means is that if you only have $10 that you can contribute to your education then and that school is going to contribute the rest of the money so that you can study in that school and this means that they're going to cover your tuition your school and board your eating your equipment everything if you get into any of these schools that offer full need based financial aid then you can study at those schools essentially for free now there's actually two categories for these schools one is called need blind and the other one is called need aware so let's actually take a look at need blind first so right now there's actually nine need blind schools so these need blind schools are actually schools that will not look at your finances when it comes to determining whether to admit you to the school or not so think of it this way they will be putting on a blindfold when it comes to money and they'll only look at your grades test scores activities and other achievements they'll decide if they want you first and then once they've decided that they want to they'll figure out how much Aid to give you or how much money to give you in order for you to come to their school so these need blind schools are going to look at you as a student first and see whether they want to admit you or not then only once they admit you then they are going to determine the finances that they'll give to you so let's actually go and take a look at some of these schools and what they say so one of these schools is actually MIT now MIT actually says on their website that there are one of the nine colleges in the US that is need blind and full need so what that means is that they will not consider your ability to pay for college in the admissions process and and then it also means that they are committed to meeting 100% of your demonstrated Financial need so that means if you only have $2 in your bank account that doesn't matter if they admit you they'll give you all the money that's needed for you to attend their institution so the other school is Harvard and what they say is that their aid is entirely need based and the eligibility is determined in the same manner for all students regardless of their nationality of citizenship so even if you're an international student they will give you the money that is required to attend their institution another thing that they say is that they will meet your demonstrated Financial need for all four years so once they determine that you need x amount they will give you that money for four years now the cool thing about all of this is that there are nine schools like this and I've put a list of them below so so definitely take a look at that link so this is one category of the schools and these schools are need blind but one thing you will notice about these schools is that they're very competitive to get into and part of the reason is because many people know that if they get into these schools then they will be able to attend because the finance part of their education will be settled so there's another category of schools and these are called need aware schools now these are need aware schools are very similar to the need blind schools so these are schools that will meet 100% of your demonstrated need however they will take that into consideration during the admissions process so what that means is as they looking at your grades and as they looking at you as a student they also consider how much you can pay for your education so what that means is if they have two students who are exactly the same one student who can pay 10,000 while the other student who can only pay $5 then they often will actually admit the student who can pay $10,000 so they are going to be considering how much money you can contribute to your education during the admissions process so if you do get into these need aware schools if you are accepted to them then most likely they will meet your financial demonstrated need but the big thing is you have to get accepted to them which is often very difficult as they are going to be looking at your finances so I've actually put a link down below with a list of schools that are need aware now these are definitely schools that you should take a look at as you're trying to determine how you're going to pay for your studies in America so to recap if you want to come and study in America then you should be looking at schools that offer full need financial aid so these schools are going to be broken down into two categories ones that are need blind and basically those are schools that are just going to look at your academics alone they don't care about your finances at all if you get into those schools they will make sure that you can attend financially and then there's the other category of schools which are need aware these schools will consider your finances when it comes to whether to admit you or not so as an international student you should be looking to get into these schools as they will provide you with the best opportunity to get funding if you like this video definitely like And subscribe as it tells me that this is the type of content that you like and allow me to make more of this content so thank you so much for watching and I'll be seeing you in the next video