<p>
Do you have a source for this? As far as I know, loans are a perfectly good funding source if a student has one secured. More often, the catch-22 seems to stem from college policies: many colleges won’t admit international students without documented funding and banks won’t authorize a loan without an acceptance letter in hand. </p>
<p>
For what it’s worth, The New School’s average grant/scholarship to international students is around $8.000 per year. Of course that’s only an average and also for all colleges combined…</p>
<p>MommaJ had a good point about visas. Work visas in the US are notoriously inconvenient and difficult to obtain. (Because there’s a yearly cap on the number of work visas, your prospective employer has just one week each year to submit a visa petition for you. A lottery decides which of the applications received in that week will be processed. If all goes well, you may start work 6 months after your work visa application was submitted. Oh, and just filing a petition on your behalf will cost your employer several thousand dollars, which he is legally not allowed to pass on to you.) If you do have your heart set on staying in the US after college, add “marrying a US citizen” or “going to graduate school” to your list of priorities. (There are additional work visas for foreigners with a graduate degree from a US university.)</p>