<p>Is Columbia generous in giving out aid for internationals?</p>
<p>generous is a weird word to use here.</p>
<p>columbia is a full-need school. if you need X they will give you X.</p>
<p>columbia is not need-blind for most international students (it is for can/mex citizens and us green card holders). which means they have a set amount of funds they can offer international students in part because they can’t count on any funds from the federal gov’t to support institutional aid. they admit as many students as they can that fits their budget. which means that financial concerns do play a role in deciding to admit candidates and often means that they are searching for very compelling cases (coming from truly underrepresented regions, exemplary work if coming from a more represented region). </p>
<p>in practice: columbia has one of the highest percentages of international students in the country and the admissions office says about half of the int’l student body is on some form of institutional aid. those not on aid: their families can fully pay the amount, or come from countries that have government sponsored aid (singapore, korea, thailand, etc.).</p>
<p>Columbia is need aware. Need blind schools for internationals are HPYM, Dartmouth and Cornell(Recently anounced, not a need blind school for ints even last year).</p>
<p>here is the full need-blind int’l list: [Schools</a> Awarding International Financial Aid](<a href=“http://www.internationalstudent.com/schools_awarding_aid/]Schools”>Schools Awarding International Financial Aid)</p>
<p>on it there are a few schools because committing to need blind for int’l students means committing to a potentially very large cost that changes from year to year. even the schools that are listed to some extent are not as altruistic as you may think. it is hard to maintain the three holy grails of financial aid: need-blind, full need and no loans. e.g. williams is fantastic, but recently announced it is pulling back on its no loans commitment starting for the 2015 class: in practice, since you can’t give federal loans to int’l students is that they are making a priority to keep their int’l aid students and instead be less kind to their domestic students. you don’t see some schools out there like columbia and stanford in part because they already have such a large int’l applicant pool that it would be easy for them to accept int’l students, but have it damage their financial aid budgets: it is a very real concern. for these schools it is more about not forgetting about domestic students and those priorities. so you see beyond HYPM a set of smaller schools like dartmouth that don’t have as international a reach. folks that would attend a lib arts from abroad are demographically different than someone that would consider a research university (in part because of the nature of most international educations) - without saying it out right, but they tend not to be as need-heavy. so dartmouth is never going to really be threatened by opening up the floodgates in the same way S or C are. in fact i’d say only really HYPM have large enough funds to really make true on their claim to be need-blind for int’l.</p>