USA Scholarships
Scholarships in the USA - Study & Research Guides
Scholarships in the USA
The United States is home to many of the world's top-ranked universities and attracts students from every corner of the globe. Scholarship opportunities range from fully funded research positions to partial tuition awards at elite business schools. Below you'll find our guides for US scholarships, each covering eligibility, documents, benefits, and how to apply.
Michigan AI Explorers Program 2027 - PhD Prep Mentorship
The Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab runs the AI Explorers Program to get talented pre-doctoral students into top PhD programmes, and it is built around output rather than lectures. Over six to nine months you work on mentored research with a weekly meeting, present progress at monthly cohort sessions, and attend monthly or bimonthly ACL mentorship sessions on research skills, career pathways and graduate admissions. You leave with two concrete things: one research paper ready to submit to a workshop, conference or journal, and a full graduate school application package covering statement of purpose, CV and research statement. Mentors are junior faculty, postdocs, senior PhD students and industry researchers, each taking one or two students. Applicants must be 18 or older by the start date, with preference for final-year Bachelor's and MS students. The 2026 round is closed and applications reopen in late 2026.
CHCI Congressional Internship Summer 2027 - Paid in DC
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute puts undergraduates and recent graduates into congressional offices on Capitol Hill for a summer, and pays properly for it. Summer 2027 interns get $4,776, furnished housing with rent and utilities covered, domestic round-trip flights to Washington, medical insurance with all premiums paid by CHCI, and a $100 a month Metro stipend. You work at least 32 hours a week in your congressional office assignment, attend an eight-day orientation and weekly leadership sessions, and complete community service hours. Applications launch on 15 August 2026 and close on 1 December 2026 for a programme running 19 May to 30 July 2027. Selection has two stages, a written application and a prerecorded interview, judged by CHCI alumni, board members and staff. Work authorisation is the hard gate: students on F-1 or M-1 visas cannot apply.
Balanced Man Scholarship 2026 - Up to $10,000 by Chapter
Sigma Phi Epsilon runs the Balanced Man Scholarship at more than 140 US universities, awarding over 500 scholarships worth around $300,000 in a year. The award goes to students living what SigEp calls a balanced life, a Sound Mind and a Sound Body, judged on academic excellence, leadership and a real commitment to health and well-being. The single most misunderstood thing about it is stated plainly on SigEp's own pages: there is no obligation to join or affiliate with the fraternity to apply or to win. Amounts and rules are set chapter by chapter, so Florida offers $10,000 to incoming freshmen with a 3.2 GPA, Cincinnati $6,000, Wisconsin-Madison $5,000. Deadlines are local too, with 1 June the early date at most schools and some chapters still open into the summer. The application is short by design: roughly 15 minutes, and at some chapters no essays at all.
Georgetown PhD Scholarship 2026 - Full Funding & Stipend
Georgetown does not run a single named PhD scholarship. What it runs is a funding package, awarded by your department on the recommendation of the programme, and at the doctoral level it is designed to cover the lot. In Biomedical Graduate Education, where the university publishes exact numbers, an incoming PhD student on a merit fellowship gets tuition covered, a 2026-27 stipend of $40,922 over nine months or $44,605 over twelve, plus student health insurance and dental. Pre-thesis tuition alone lists at $31,416 a semester, so the tuition line matters as much as the cash. There is no separate scholarship form: you apply to the doctoral programme and the funding decision comes with the admission decision. Most Georgetown PhD deadlines land on 1 December at 11:59 PM EST, including Global Infectious Disease, Biology, History, Linguistics, Psychology and Nursing, with a second cluster on 15 December and a third on 15 January.
Cullman Center Fellowship 2027 - $90,000 at the NYPL
The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers gives fifteen people a year an office inside the New York Public Library, a $90,000 stipend, and nine months to write. Fellows work at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue from September through May, five days a week, and the project has to genuinely need those collections rather than merely benefit from the address. Academics, independent scholars, novelists, playwrights, poets and visual artists working on a book project are all welcome, and the programme is international, though your application must be in English. Two exclusions end a lot of applications early: no academic projects from post-doctoral fellows, and no graduate-school dissertation research. Applications for 2027-2028 close on 25 September 2026 at 5pm EDT, with decisions in March 2027 and the term running 7 September 2027 to 26 May 2028.
Stamps Scholars Program 2026 - Up to $98,000 a Year
The Stamps Scholars Program does something unusual: it splits the bill with the university. E. Roe Stamps and his late wife Penny founded it in 2006, and today the foundation and its partner schools evenly share the cost of multi-year awards worth $20,000 to $98,000 a year, which over four years comes to between $80,000 and $392,000. On top of that every scholar gets a separate enrichment fund for study abroad, academic conferences and leadership training. You cannot apply to Stamps directly, and the website says so plainly. You apply to a partner university, and at most of them the normal freshman application by the early or scholarship deadline puts you in the running automatically. Deadlines are set school by school: 1 November at Boston College and Notre Dame Early Action, 3 November for non-residents at Georgia Tech, 5 December at Tulane, 1 January at Northeastern. Financial need is not a consideration anywhere.
IEEE-USA Government Fellowship 2027 - $100,000 in DC
IEEE-USA has been sending engineers to Washington since 1973, and more than 150 of its US members have now spent a year advising Congress or the State Department. Fellows get a stipend of $95,000 plus a $5,000 relocation allowance, paid in two lump sums, and run from 1 September to 31 August. Three tracks are open: the Congressional Fellowship, the Congressional Electric Grid Policy Fellowship, and the Engineering and Diplomacy Fellowship at the US Department of State. Eligibility is narrow and specific. You need a PhD, or a master's plus five years of full-time professional experience, you must be a US citizen, and you must be an IEEE member in good standing. You also have to live in Washington for the year, because the work cannot be done remotely. Application materials for the 2027-2028 year have not been posted yet, and the previous cycle closed in early January.
ICASE Presidential Scholarship 2026 - Indiana Special Ed
The Indiana Council of Administrators of Special Education gives two $1,000 scholarships a year to people training to become special education administrators in Indiana. The pool is genuinely small, which is the point: you have to be accepted or already enrolled in a Director of Exceptional Needs licensing program in the state, and a current special education director has to nominate you. Nobody applies cold. The application window for this cycle opens on 1 October 2026 and closes on 30 December 2026, and what you submit is compact by scholarship standards: the application form, two letters of recommendation, and one essay answering a single question about what you intend to contribute as an administrator in special education. Applications are scored against a published rubric. If you are already teaching in an Indiana school and working towards a director's licence, this is one of the few awards written specifically for you.
University of Idaho Scholarship 2027 - Go Idaho! & WUE
University of Idaho does something most universities do not: it tells you what you will get before you apply. Idaho residents entering from high school are guaranteed a Go Idaho! award set purely by unweighted GPA, from $1,000 a year at 3.0 up to $7,500 a year at 3.9, held for four years on a 2.5 U of I GPA. Students from the fourteen WUE states plus Guam and the Northern Marianas get the Western Undergraduate Exchange discount worth nearly $16,000 a year, rising to almost $19,000 with a 3.9 GPA. Everyone else, including international students, is looked at for Invitation to Idaho, also worth close to $16,000 a year. None of it needs a scholarship application. You apply for admission and the awards are considered automatically, on a rolling basis, with the Fall 2027 application already open and award letters going out from late December 2026.
Horatio Alger Scholarship 2027 - $25,000 for Juniors
The Horatio Alger Association hands out 105 National Scholarships of $25,000 each, and unlike almost every other award at this size it is not looking for the strongest transcript in the room. The GPA floor is 2.0, there is no SAT or ACT requirement, and adjusted gross family income has to be $100,000 or lower. What the selection committee actually weighs is adversity: what you have been through, and what you did about it. The National Scholarship is now a high school junior award, applied for between 1 December 2026 and 1 March 2027, while seniors have their own window closing 15 February 2027 across the Association's other 70-plus programmes. One application puts you in front of every scholarship you qualify for. Two hard gates end most applications early: you must be a US citizen, with permanent residents and DREAM Act recipients excluded outright, and you need both a counselor certification and a support form from an unrelated adult over 21.
GEM Fellowship Program 2026 - Funded MS & PhD in STEM
The National GEM Consortium pairs engineering and science graduate students with the companies and universities that will pay for their degree. An Employer Fellow gets full tuition and fees from a GEM member university, a stipend of at least $16,000, and paid summer internships with the sponsoring company: up to two for a master's, at least one for a PhD, with PhD tuition covered up to the fifth year. Applications for the 2026 cycle opened on 1 July and close at 11:59 PM Eastern on 13 November 2026, the second Friday in November. Two things trip people up. You must be a US citizen or permanent resident at the time of application, and you must apply directly to at least three GEM member universities on top of the GEM application itself, by their own deadlines or 15 January, whichever comes first. Minimum GPA is 2.8 for the MS track and 3.0 for the PhD track. The GRE is strongly encouraged and not required.
ERP Scholarship 2027 - $2,500/Month for US Study
The ERP Scholarship Program sends ten to twenty German graduates a year to top US universities for a master's degree, the coursework phase of a PhD, or a research stay tied to a German dissertation. Money on the table: $2,500 a month, a $500 start-up grant, a $1,000 travel grant, and up to $25,000 per academic year towards tuition. It runs on the yield from Germany's share of the Marshall Plan, the European Recovery Program the name is short for, and has done since 1994. You do not need a US admission offer to apply, and you do not need to have held a Studienstiftung scholarship before. What you do need is a bachelor's degree awarded no more than five years ago, excellent grades, and a serious answer to why you want to work in public service. Applications for the 2027/28 academic year run from 1 July to 20 September 2026, by email only.