USA Scholarships
Partial Funding Scholarship Guides
Partial Funding Scholarships
Not every scholarship covers 100% of your costs, but partial funding can still make a huge difference. The scholarships listed here cover a significant share of tuition or living expenses, reducing what you need to pay out of pocket.
NIU Political Science Scholarship 2027 - Awards & Funding
The NIU Political Science Scholarship 2027 is the funding the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University puts in front of its own students, from named undergraduate scholarships awarded through the MyScholarships portal to graduate assistantships worth at least $14,000 a year for doctoral students. Undergraduates are matched to political science awards by filing one general application, which opens 15 November 2026 with a priority deadline of 31 January 2027. Graduate applicants apply to the MA or PhD by 15 January and are considered for assistantship support in the spring. Six named departmental graduate awards, including the Martin David Dubin Memorial Scholarship and the $1,000 Russell W. Smith Memorial Endowment, close on 1 March.
ACI Foundation Scholarship 2026 - $5,000 to $10,000
The ACI Foundation funds students heading into the concrete industry, and it runs more than thirty named awards through one shared student application portal with one set of core requirements. Scholarship recipients get a $5,000 educational stipend for tuition, residence, books and materials. Fellowship recipients get $10,000 plus paid travel to two ACI Conventions. Two Middle East awards sit alongside them at $7,000 and $5,000 with regional travel and certification included. The window is open now: applications opened on 1 July 2026 and close on 1 November 2026, with no late applications accepted. What you submit is compact but strict, a resume, a 500-word essay on your long-term career interest in concrete, official transcripts sent by the institution rather than by you, and two endorsements of which at least one must come from an ACI member. Fellowship finalists are interviewed in person at the spring ACI Concrete Convention, with travel paid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
East-West Center Graduate Student Conference 2027 - Hawaii
The 26th East-West Center International Graduate Student Conference runs 11 to 13 February 2027 at the Hawai'i Imin International Conference Center in Honolulu, under the theme Weaving Knowledge for Shared Indo-Pacific Prosperity. Abstracts close on 30 September 2026 at 11:59 PM Hawaii time, submitted through Submittable as a 350-word abstract plus a 100-word plain-language summary. Junior and senior undergraduates, graduate students, and anyone who finished a graduate degree in the past year can submit. The conference has been student-run since 2002 and takes academic papers, creative works, performance and film, with the choice of presenting in Honolulu or live online. Nobody funds your seat. Registration was $85 in person for IGSC 2026 if you paid before 15 December, and travel, visa and lodging are yours to arrange, though EWC residence hall rooms are held for participants from $113 a night.
UNFPA Global Internship Roster 2026 - Paid UN Internships
The UNFPA Global Internship Roster 2026 is a single application that puts you in front of every hiring team at the United Nations Population Fund for a year, from the New York headquarters to regional and country offices around the world. You apply once to the roster rather than chasing individual postings, and teams pull interns from it as their needs come up. Interns who are not funded by a university, government or scholarship programme get a monthly stipend paid in local currency, sized to the duty station. What the stipend does not cover matters just as much: you arrange and pay for your own medical insurance, travel and accommodation, and you have to show proof of insurance before your first day. Eligibility is broad by UN standards. Final-year undergraduates, master's and PhD students, postgraduate professional trainees, and anyone who graduated within the past year can all apply. The roster closes 31 December 2026.
UoPeople Scholarships 2027 - Tuition-Free US Degrees
University of the People is an accredited American online university that charges no tuition and no money for textbooks or course materials. What it does charge is a one-time $60 application fee and an assessment fee at the end of every course: $180 for undergraduate courses, $430 for M.Ed. courses and $490 for MBA and MS-IT courses. A full bachelor's degree comes to $7,260 and an MBA to $5,940. UoPeople scholarships exist to cover those fees, funded by partners including SAP, Intel, the Algorand Foundation and the Simone Biles Legacy Scholarship Fund, alongside country and refugee funds. There is no scholarship deadline. You apply for admission first, and once accepted you request a scholarship from the funding page in the Student Portal, where money is granted first-come, first-served and applied to your assessment fees until it runs out.