by Steven Tagle
Graduate School Scholarships: When and How to Start Your Search
Most aspiring grad students don’t start thinking about scholarships until the spring, when schools send out admission notifications as well as details on financial aid, admission-based scholarships, and teaching positions. However, the best time to begin researching scholarships and fellowships is much earlier, when you are applying to graduate programs.
As you decide which degrees and programs to target, it’s important to consider the financial ramifications. Grad school in the United States is not cheap. For example, the estimated cost of attendance at UCLA for the 2025-2026 academic year ranges from $57,780 for California residents to $72,882 for nonresidents. Ask yourself: What is my financial plan for grad school? Do I have enough savings to cover two to three years of tuition plus living expenses? If not, how much funding – if any – does each program offer? Does it make sense to go into debt to get my degree?
Familiarizing yourself with the financial realities of higher education and creating a scholarship strategy before you apply will save you the heartache and anxiety so many recent admits feel when they receive admissions offers and realize they’ll have to pay full price to attend their dream schools.
Getting Accepted Does Not Guarantee Funding
Although submitting a competitive application will likely grant you acceptance to one or more universities, it will not automatically guarantee you a scholarship. Given the diverse functions of graduate programs, the criteria for determining who gets funded vary dramatically among programs and institutions. For the most part, students are expected to pay for non-PhD programs with their own resources. Meanwhile, PhD students are expected to teach for the university in exchange for tuition waivers and a limited living stipend.
Most graduate programs do offer a few admissions-based scholarships, but these opportunities are incredibly rare. The majority are created by individuals, institutions, or organizations that wish to fund certain individuals to pursue particular educational goals.
Merit is rarely the only factor admissions committees take into consideration when distributing scholarships. Qualifying for these opportunities often depends on a number of unique and unpredictable variables that change from year to year: the specific needs of private donors, regional or state quotas, internal administrative initiatives, balanced distribution across the student population, and market-based endowments, for example. And contrary to popular belief, belonging to an underserved community is not the magic key to earning a scholarship either.
No matter how smart and accomplished you are, the odds of both getting into your top-choice school and receiving a scholarship are not in your favor. So, rather than banking on an admissions-based scholarship, you should seek out individualized scholarship opportunities while you are applying for school and throughout your time as a student.
How Do You Secure Funding?
The students who win the most scholarships are those who actively identify and apply for scholarships. If you are applying to graduate programs that do not guarantee full funding for the entire cohort, I recommend you also apply for ten to 15 scholarships outside your university. Applying for extramural funding should become a habit that you continue annually for as long as you’re enrolled. And, yes, that means more applications to fill out, more work, more deadlines, and more writing.
Finding extramural scholarships is also not always straightforward or easy. Most scholarship organizations want to spend their money on students’ education and do not have big budgets for overhead, marketing, user experience design, or application platforms. Therefore, when you start searching scholarship databases or Googling “graduate school scholarships,” you will find long lists with outdated links. You will also find confusing websites featuring unclear eligibility requirements, old deadlines, and vague application instructions. Often, the process can be confusing, exhausting, and overwhelming.
Most students who make it to this part of the scholarship search process either give up without really getting started or determine that there just isn’t anything out there for them. Like those who count on receiving admission-based scholarships, the students who give up after a few online searches – or even a few completed applications – just don’t win scholarships.
You Can Do This!
The first step in any scholarship search is accepting that finding and winning scholarships takes time and effort. If you want scholarship money, you’ll have to work for it. At times, it will seem repetitive, tedious, and downright discouraging. You will inevitably encounter scholarship applications that seem difficult, inconsistent, and arbitrary.
But if you do the work and incorporate strategic, focused, and consistent search and application processes into your routine as a graduate student, you will be more qualified to receive scholarships than most of your peers.
A Stanford graduate and the recipient of prestigious fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the Institute of Current World Affairs, as well as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, Steven Tagle has taught and mentored students for 20 years. As a published writer, journalist, and former speechwriter for the U.S. ambassador to Greece, he knows how to draw out applicants’ unique stories and craft compelling personal statements that help their applications stand out from the pack. Work with Steven! Schedule a free consultation today!
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