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The Experts View - student finance
More questions are asked at education fairs, interviews and seminars about ways in which a prospective graduate student might fund their one or two year masters programmes or their period of research than any other matter related to graduate education.
The Expert’s View
More questions are asked at education fairs, interviews and seminars about ways in which a prospective graduate student might fund their one or two year masters programmes or their period of research than any other matter related to graduate education. Whether you have chosen a shortlist of universities based on world university rankings, or taken the advice of alumni or friend who have already attended a particular university, student finance is such a major issue for all students that it tends to dominate much of the period spent choosing an applying to one of the top universities.
The reality is, however, that perhaps all this worrying over student finance, financial aid and scholarships is wasted energy. A look at international mobility statistics and various reports offered by such organisations as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Institute of Education (IIE) makes some trends regarding student finance very clear indeed. At the masters level, the majority of international students seeking a program of this level are self-funded through their own personal funds, family funds or commercial bank loans. In 2006 in the USA, approximately 70% of all international masters students were funded from personal sources, while institutional financial awards constituted less than 20% of all fee-paying international students. Can we conclude anything from this? In part, yes – when considering the US for masters-level education, be at least partly prepared to pay some of the costs associated with the program yourself.
Across all institution types in the USA, however, little over 50% of all international students rely on personal funding, largely due to the fact that the research university provided almost 50% of their international students with some kind of financial aid, whether through scholarship, stipend or teaching assistantship. This development matches the policy of many US institutions and the government overall to secure the best international researchers for intellectual and economic reasons, contributing to both the institutions themselves and US productivity overall. This leads us to a much more positive conclusion; for research-level students, US universities are very likely indeed to offer you some form of financial aid to cover the cost of studies.
And, of course, scholarships are not just available at US institutions. Many of the top 200 universities in the world invest considerable resources in scholarship programs to ensure that they can tempt, recruit and fund the best graduate students possible. In some cases, national governments also establish significant funding programs to attract students to their graduate education systems.
Education agents and government representatives alike, located in the major source markets for international students, report substantial increases in the socio-economic groups that have the ability to pay for international education services. The often cited examples of the growing middle classes in both China and India and their ability to pay for goods and services is both the result of this growing affluence in these countries and their improving economic conditions. It should therefore be no surprise that the growing numbers of students leaving these countries for higher education programmes overseas reflect this new economic success. There is a very real link, in these instances, between the growth of a country’s GDP and the participation rate in international education and this may certainly indicate an ability to pay.
Funding your period of study abroad requires a great deal of research, but the process of making applications for scholarships or fellowships should not be too daunting. There are literally hundreds of thousands of students enrolled in graduate programs all over the world today who are able to do so because they are in receipt of some kind of financial aid. They have been through the very processes that you are thinking about embarking on; the pages of applications and research proposals, the deadlines and, in some cases, the rigorous interviews and been successful. The task is by no means an easy one and will certainly be one of the most competitive activities you ever enter. But it may ultimately be very worthwhile. Good luck.
