How One Bangkok Student Cracked the Financial Aid Puzzle

In March 2025, Harvard announced that undergraduates from families earning $200,000 or less a year would attend tuition-free starting that fall, with students from households earning $100,000 or less also getting housing, food, and health services covered, according to CNBC. The university said the change would make roughly 86% of American families eligible for aid. It was covered nationally as a landmark act of access. For a high school senior in Bangkok watching her own financial aid offers arrive from seven different American universities, the news landed differently: full tuition at one school, a $20,000 cut at another, a final number still unresolved months later at a third. It confirmed what aid could look like at the very top of American higher education, and how far outside that circle most applicants, especially those applying from abroad, actually stand.

That senior is Premi, a production team leader on Students Incorporated, the student-run podcast at the International Community School of Bangkok (ICS Bangkok). On a recent episode, she and her father, Paul, walked through the two years they'd spent figuring out how to pay for an American college education, a process Premi described as unusually complicated even by the standards of a system built on complexity. Her parents are divorced, her mother earns income in the United States, and reconciling all of that across a dozen different applications turned into what amounted to a part-time job for both of them.

Seven Schools, Seven Different Verdicts

The starkest evidence of how unpredictable the process can be is the spread of results Paul described once decisions started arriving. One school accepted Premi in December but the family was still waiting months later on a final aid number, held up while they gathered documentation of her mother's US income. Duke University's initial package put the annual cost at $98,000; after the family supplied additional income data, that dropped to $78,000, with a Pell Grant layered on top. Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) came back with full tuition covered by a mix of merit aid and the Pell Grant. William & Mary cut its price from roughly $70,000 to $50,000. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offered full tuition, need-based aid that Premi attributed to UNC counting only her custodial parent's income rather than both parents'. Boston University also came in at full tuition. A seventh offer, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, rounded out the list.

Seven applications, evaluated against the same family, produced seven different numbers, because seven aid offices define "need" differently and weigh divorced parents' income differently. That inconsistency isn't a fluke; it's structural. Only a small number of American universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Amherst, with Brown recently joining them starting with the class of 2029) are both need-blind in admissions and committed to meeting full financial need for international applicants, according to reporting compiled by Interstride and study-abroad advisers. Everywhere else, an international applicant negotiates a different rulebook at every school, often without knowing the rules going in.

The Paperwork Behind the Number

Before any of those offers arrived, the family had to complete the CSS Profile, the College Board's financial aid application used by most private universities that award their own institutional aid. Premi described it as more than 200 questions covering parental income, assets, home equity, family size and, in her case, a full accounting of her four younger siblings' current and projected tuition costs at five-year intervals. "My father and I sat down for several Sundays to make sure everything was filled out," she said. Divorced families file a second, separate CSS Profile for the non-custodial parent, a process Premi called confusing enough that she flagged it as a trap for other students in the same situation.

The CSS Profile costs $25 for the first school and $16 for each additional one, plus another $25 for a non-custodial parent's profile, a bill that climbs quickly, though fee waivers exist for lower-income families. Many colleges then route supporting tax documents through the Institutional Documentation Service (IDOC), which Mr. Jason, the show's host, noted can take three to five business days to process once a student receives an access code from the College Board, itself a step that can take up to a day. None of that paperwork guarantees an outcome: as Premi put it, without embellishment, "so much of the college application process is already a crapshoot."

So much of the college application process is already a crapshoot.

Why the Playing Field Tilts

International students are locked out of the other major channel of US financial aid entirely. FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and the federal aid it unlocks (Pell Grants, subsidized and unsubsidized loans) are reserved for US citizens and eligible permanent residents. The maximum Pell Grant for the 2025-26 award year is $7,395, according to the US Department of Education, an amount that moves annually but has stayed flat the past two cycles. For international families, that entire channel simply doesn't exist; institutional and merit aid are the only levers available.

The gap that creates is measurable. US News found the average aid package awarded to international undergraduates was roughly $25,000 for the 2024-25 school year across more than 800 surveyed schools. But more than triple that, about $84,000, at the 20 schools that award international students the most aid. Merit scholarships compound the imbalance: Premi cited Emory University's full-ride finalist program, where roughly 150 US applicants reached finalist status against only about seven international finalists in a recent cycle, the same pool of money drawn from a much smaller slice of applicants abroad. Named programs like WashU's Danforth, Ervin, and Rodriguez Scholars, Duke's Robertson Scholars Program (run jointly with UNC Chapel Hill), UNC's Morehead-Cain, and Vanderbilt's Cornelius Vanderbilt, Chancellor's, and Ingram scholarships all offer full tuition or better, but nearly all require applying regular decision rather than binding early decision, since, as Premi explained, schools have little financial incentive to offer merit money to a student already contractually committed to enroll.

Some aid exists specifically to correct for the imbalance. QuestBridge's National College Match, a nonprofit that partners with 55 US colleges, matched more than 2,500 students with four-year, full-cost scholarships in 2025, awards that include zero parental contribution and no student loans, according to the organization. A handful of scholarships, like Wesleyan University's Asian Freeman Scholarship and African Scholars Program, are restricted to international applicants specifically, inverting the usual scarcity. When institutional packages fall short, most colleges also allow a formal appeal, a written statement, backed by updated tax documents, asking the aid office to reconsider. Premi and Paul went through that process directly, and Premi recommended filing before regular-decision offers flood the same aid office with a fresh wave of appeals.

Beyond the United States

Two of Premi's guests on the episode were weighing the same math against different countries entirely. Adi, planning to pursue medicine, had initially targeted US medical schools before concluding the cost and odds for an international applicant made it impractical; she's now committed, contingent on her AP scores, to the University of Dublin, where a merit-based package would cover a full ride if she hits the required grades and maintains them across six years. She described UK aid as harder to secure than American aid, in her experience, since most UK universities are private with no government funding, a dynamic that pushed her toward Ireland, whose university system sits outside the UK and, she said, offered more generous aid. A second guest, Grace, known on the show as Hiwi, had originally hoped to study in the US before deciding Korean universities, where she applied to marketing and film programs, were the better fit.

Data from NAFSA, the association of international educators, puts a number on what's at stake in these decisions: international students contributed $42.9 billion to the American economy in the 2024-25 academic year and supported more than 355,000 jobs, even as overall enrollment dipped slightly for the first time in four years. Most of that spending comes from families paying close to full price, a dynamic some commentators describe as international students subsidizing aid for domestic classmates, though the picture is contested, since most international students say they're covering costs themselves rather than through institutional largesse.

None of that made the process less grinding for Premi. She missed the November 15 deadline for Emory's scholarship program by two days, only learning about it on November 17. She emailed the admissions counselor anyway. He gave her five hours to submit a completed application. She used them, and earned a $100,000 award. Her advice to underclassmen, delivered with the specificity of someone who has now read hundreds of pages of financial aid fine print: reach out anyway, check every deadline, and don't assume the answer is no before you've asked the question.

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