Funding Graduate Study in North America

At top US universities a full-fee remission, along with a living grant, is often available to students accepted onto doctoral programs. This may also include your master’s degree, but usually only as part of a sequential course leading on to a PhD.  

In contrast to undergraduate education, where admission and financial awards are controlled at the institutional level, US graduate education is quite tightly controlled at the departmental level. Funding for certain fields tends to be more heavily subsidised than for others. For example, a student of physics, chemistry, or biology may find institutional funding more readily available than a student of humanities, the social sciences, or education. 

There are also independent foundations and scholarship organisations that provide funding for students studying in the US. Many of these awards will also pay for living and travel expenses.  

One such organisation is the US-UK Fulbright Commission, which grants between six and ten postgraduate awards in any discipline at the US institution of the UK student’s choice. The award covers tuition fees, health insurance, and living expenses for the first year of study only.  

Funding directories, such as The Grants Register (Palgrave Macmillan) published annually, show there are hundreds of independent awards available, so doing as much research as possible is a key factor in getting funding. 

An alternative funding avenue that will appeal to the athletically gifted is sporting scholarships, which are far more lucrative and widespread in the US than in the vast majority of other countries.  

UK graduate Charlotte Buxton studied for a two-year master’s degree in creative writing at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles, USA with the help of an athletic scholarship. “Most colleges in the US give a range of financial support to student athletes in all kinds of sports - from the obvious, like American football, baseball or softball, and basketball, to golf, soccer, and cheerleading,” she says. 

One thing is for sure: if you apply in a haphazard manner, at the last minute and without sufficient research and planning, your chances of securing funding for your graduate study are minimal.  

On the other hand, with full-fee awards worth anything up to US$30-40,000 (~CAD$40-54,000) per year at top US and Canadian universities - and in some cases with a stipend for living expenses on top of that - the hours you spend researching, preparing and submitting your scholarship applications could end up being some of the best-paid work you ever do.