Why College Financial Aid Is Even Harder From Overseas

American college financial aid runs on two different tracks depending on where an applicant's passport was issued, and the gap between them has been widening rather than closing. Harvard announced in March 2025 that tuition would be free for students from families earning $200,000 or less starting that fall, with everything else (housing, food, insurance, travel) covered for families under $100,000, a change that makes roughly 86% of American households eligible for a full ride. That same season, on a Students Incorporated episode built around one family's actual paperwork, a Bangkok high schooler and her father walked through what financial aid looks like when a family isn't the one the system was built around.

Premi, a student at the International Community School of Bangkok and the podcast's production team leader, is the first person in her family to apply to college in the United States. She has four younger siblings, divorced parents, and a mother whose income is earned in the U.S. while she and her father live in Thailand, a combination that turned two years of research into what she and her father, Paul, presented on air as a working manual for other international families. The headline takeaway from their two years of documents, appeals, and spreadsheet math: getting in is one contest. Paying for it is a completely separate one, with its own rules, its own paperwork, and, for students applying from outside the U.S., much worse odds.

The Homework Assignment Before the Homework

Before any financial aid arrives, most private universities require the CSS Profile, a College Board application that Premi described as more than 200 questions covering parental income, assets, home equity, family size and, because she has four younger siblings, a full accounting of each sibling's past, current, and projected tuition and expenses, repeated across multiple years. She said it took her and her father "several Sundays" to complete. The application costs $25 for the first college and $16 for each additional one, fees confirmed on the College Board's own site, and families with divorced parents face an extra layer: many schools require a second, separate CSS Profile from the non-custodial parent, filed under its own College Board account, with its own $25 fee.

For a family like Premi's, that second profile brought its own complications. Because her mother earns income in the U.S. while filing as a non-custodial parent from Thailand, the family had to submit U.S. tax forms (1065s, 1099s, W-2s) alongside Thai revenue-department documents translated into English. The Profile automatically converts Thai baht to U.S. dollars, but exchange rates fluctuate and the form doesn't recalculate; Premi said her family picked one conversion rate early on and simply stuck with it. Colleges can waive the non-custodial parent's Profile in cases involving abuse, no contact, or a legal order, but not simply because a parent is unwilling to pay more than they've budgeted. As Premi put it, financial aid offices "will mostly not" accept that argument if tax documents show the parent can actually afford more.

The Same Family, Wildly Different Numbers

What makes the episode more useful than a generic explainer is that Premi and her father shared the actual results. Financial aid offices calculate need with a simple formula: total cost of attendance minus a family's expected contribution equals demonstrated need, which some schools promise to cover in full. But "in full" depends entirely on whose income a school counts. Schools like Duke and Yale, Paul explained, count both custodial and non-custodial parents' finances: the family's Duke package initially set tuition at $98,000 before an appeal, plus new U.S. income documentation, brought it down to $78,000 with an added Pell Grant. Washington University in St. Louis offered full tuition through a mix of merit aid and Pell Grant funding. Emory's institutional aid dropped Premi's cost from roughly $70,000 to $50,000 after her family appealed. But William & Mary and UNC Chapel Hill count only the custodial parent's income, and both treated her case far more favorably; UNC alone came back with a full-tuition offer. Same student, same family, different accounting rule, different bill.

That gap is not an accident of one family's situation; it reflects how rare full-need aid actually is. As of 2025, need-blind admissions for international applicants exists at only eight U.S. universities (Amherst, Bowdoin, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Yale), and only about a dozen schools nationwide meet 100% of demonstrated need for every student, domestic or international, without loans, according to policy trackers maintained by college-access platforms PrepScholar and Quad Education Group. Everyone else is making a judgment call about how much of a family's true financial picture to count, which is exactly the inconsistency Premi's spreadsheet of results lays bare.

I would argue that sometimes it is more difficult than just getting into a top five or an Ivy League institution.

That line, from Premi, was about merit scholarships specifically, and the numbers back her up. She cited Emory's full-ride finalist program, where roughly 150 finalists that year were U.S. citizens or domestic students, against only about seven international finalists. Most "outside" scholarships not tied to a specific college (Coca-Cola, the Gates Scholarship, the Coolidge Scholarship) are restricted to U.S. citizens or permanent residents, which is part of why QuestBridge stands out as an exception: its National College Match matched 2,550 finalists with its 55 partner colleges in 2025, each receiving a full four-year scholarship worth more than $360,000 with zero parental contribution and no loans, according to QuestBridge's own December 2025 results announcement. Premi also described her own appeals strategy in detail: citing more recent, lower parental income when available, breaking a family's monthly budget down into concrete numbers, and always following up directly with financial aid officers, in person when possible, because "you will be in conversation with them for the next four years."

When the Math Doesn't Work, Students Look Elsewhere

Two other ICS Bangkok students on the episode had already made that calculation and walked away from the U.S. entirely. Adi, aiming for medicine, said she'd originally hoped to study in America but found the cost, the multi-year pipeline into medical school, and the odds for international applicants discouraging enough that she committed instead to the University of Dublin, where financial aid is tied to standardized test scores and requires keeping her grades up for all six years of an integrated program. She said aid at UK medical schools was, in her experience, harder to secure than in the U.S. because so many British universities are privately funded rather than government-backed, part of a broader account of why she looked to Ireland, which she described as more welcoming to international applicants, instead.

Her instinct about the difficulty of studying in the U.S. as an international student lines up with what happened across American higher education in the year after the episode aired. The Washington Post reported in November 2025 that new international student enrollment had fallen 17% that fall, with graduate programs down 24%, as consulates slowed visa interviews and federal immigration enforcement stepped up actions on campuses, a decline CNBC reported the same month could cost the U.S. economy more than $1 billion. Grace, known on the show as Hiwi and pursuing marketing and film, made a similar calculation for different reasons, choosing Korean universities over her original dream of studying in the U.S. Tuition in South Korea runs roughly $5,800 to $6,500 a semester, versus upward of $25,000 a semester at an out-of-state American public university, according to cost comparisons published by the study-abroad guides Go Overseas and Asia Exchange, a gap that makes the choice look less like a dream deferred and more like arithmetic.

None of that means the U.S. system is unbeatable. Premi's own advice, born from watching her Emory application land two days after a scholarship deadline and still turn into a $100,000 award after she simply emailed and asked for an extension, was to keep reaching out anyway. "There are so many resources," she said. "There are so many opportunities. And to never be afraid." The paperwork, in other words, is real, but so is the fact that most families, wherever they're applying from, are learning it for the first time too.

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