Hello All,
I am an international student, and visited a fair where i met the Kent State University. They said that if you get
a SAT score over 1200, then you will be considered for a scholarship. They themselves said that getting a scholarship
would be very easy there.
However, Kent State isn’t my first option, and really want to know about the other universities, as the following:
LSE, MIT, Harvard, Duke, Princeton, U.Penn, Cambridge, Oxford, CMU…
LSE, Cambridge and Oxford do not generally give scholarships to international students, although Oxford and Cambridge have some specific ones for specific countries- you can check and see if yours is one of them.
There are 2 types of scholarship: merit aid and financial aid. All of the US colleges have a lot of info on their websites about what aid they offer and who is eligible for it. Note that Harvard, Princeton, UPenn and MIT only offer financial aid, not merit aid. Duke has a small number of ‘named’ merit scholarships, as well as financial aid and CMU has some merit scholarships as well.
Be aware that getting some amount of scholarship may be very easy- but the amount may not be very big.
And all the schools you listed have very high requirements for admission (much higher than Kent State).
Yes I understand. It is just that - in the university fair, not many universities came (probably the top was UCL (UK)). Kent State was one of the US universities i talked to. And they told me that if you get a 1200 or above, you have a good chance of scholarship. So i was just wondering if there is anything alike that in LSE, MIT, Harvard, Duke, Princeton, U.Penn, Cambridge, Oxford, CMU etc
MIT, Harvard, Princeton, and UPenn do not give scholarships. They only give need based grants after looking at the family’s whole financial situation.
1200 is low for merit scholarships even at most average, not top, universities. 1400+ is probably more common. My kids look for schools with scholarships and their goal is to be above a 1400. (For example, look at Univeristy of Alabama’s website. A 1200 doesn’t earn any scholarship $$. 1210 earns a small amt, $3500/yr. A 1400 gives almost $26,000/yr. http://scholarships.ua.edu/types/out-of-state.html )
Not all schools offer scholarships. Many on your list don’t. They only offer financial aid. How they offer aid to international students may be different than how they offer aid to US citizens.
OK, I’ll stand by to get slammed for this, but here goes anyway: merit scholarships are financial aid. Financial aid has two general components: merit awards (academic, athletic, talent) and need-based awards. The reason I point this out (again) is because this is how things are understood in the broader college financial aid world, and using incorrect terminology or definitions can be confusing. To add to the confusion, many colleges label some of their need-based grants as “scholarships.”
No need to slam! we can just say need-based scholarships and merit scholarships 
@belknappoint True, but for an international student that makes it overly complicated. Schools like Alabama that offer merit scholarships don’t offer need-based aid. They package the federal grants/ loans which an international student will not qualify for. So for them, there is a huge difference between the distinction between merit scholarships and need-based aid.
Only schools which offer institutional grants combined with scholarships combined with federal grants/loans is there really a blur between what is what.
FWIW, many schools that offer large merit scholarships do not require any financial info to be provided at all. So it isn’t really part of a FA package. It is simply a merit award.
It isn’t part of a financial aid package put together by the FA office that takes financial need into consideration, but merit aid is still technically “financial aid.”