Verified against official sources — 1 November 2026

Funding Your US Applications: Fees, Scholarships, Assistantships and Loans

NEW Published 1 November 2026

The money questions of a US application begin long before the visa interview — in the fees you pay to apply at all, the scholarships and assistantships decided alongside admission, and the funding evidence your university will ask for before it issues your I-20. This guide works through each of those stages from official sources only, and it is deliberately light on numbers: most of the figures applicants repeat to each other do not exist in any official text.

SECTION 01What Applying Itself Costs

MECHANISM — The application fee belongs to the university, not to the system. There is no US government application charge for university admission and no nationally set fee. Each institution decides whether to charge applicants and how much, which is why EducationUSA's budgeting guidance is built around variation: "Actual costs vary by institution, so refer to each institution's website for specific costs." Its finance overview makes the same point from the other direction, noting that "U.S. institutions offer a wide array of programs with a wide array of tuition and fees" — and flagging that some institutions advertise "waived application fees" as one of the provisions a student can search for. The practical consequence is that any single figure quoted as "the application fee" for US universities is wrong by construction: applying to six universities means six separate fee decisions, each read off that university's own admissions pages, and some universities on a shortlist may charge nothing at all. Our companion guide to How to shortlist US universities treats this per-university cost as one of the facts to record for every school you consider.

MECHANISM — Tests and score reports are separate charges, levied per event. Where a university requires standardised tests — English-proficiency tests, or graduate admissions tests — the test is booked and paid for with the test provider, not with the university, and sending official scores to universities is a separate step in the same system. EducationUSA's own application-cost support programme lists the components in a way that confirms the structure: its Opportunity Funds coverage names "Standardized exams … test logistics, and score reports" as distinct up-front costs of applying, alongside university application fees themselves. We print no test prices here: they are set by each provider, they change, and several of the tests a given university accepts may carry different prices — the figure that matters is the one on the provider's registration page for the test your shortlist actually requires, checked when you book. What can be planned without any figure is the shape: one test fee per sitting, and score-sending treated as its own line in the budget whenever a university requires an official report rather than a self-reported score.

MECHANISM — Credential evaluation, where required, is another third-party charge. Some universities ask applicants with Indian qualifications to have their transcripts evaluated by an approved credential-evaluation agency, so that marks and degrees can be read in US terms. Where this applies, the evaluation is ordered from the agency, the agency sets its own fee, and the university's admissions pages name which evaluations it accepts. Not every university requires it — many assess Indian transcripts in-house — so this is a conditional cost, triggered only by a requirement printed on your chosen universities' pages. The documents side of the application, including how transcripts and evaluations fit together, is covered in our The complete application process, stage by stage; this article simply books the cost into the budget in Section 07 whenever a shortlist university imposes it.

WAIVERS — The Common App fee waiver is a real scheme with a defined mechanism. For undergraduate applications made through the Common App, Common App itself states the purpose plainly: "Common App doesn't want application fees to stop any student from applying to college." A student who meets one of its listed qualifications requests the waiver inside the application — through My Common Application, under Profile, in the Common App fee waiver section — reviews the eligibility requirements and signs to confirm eligibility. The listed qualifications are framed around US circumstances (for example, participation in the federal free or reduced-price lunch programme, an SAT or ACT fee waiver, family income within USDA guidelines, public assistance, or a supporting statement from a school official, college access counsellor, financial aid officer or community leader). The outcome, where a college accepts the waiver, is complete rather than partial: "You won't have to pay an application fee to colleges who accept the Common App fee waiver when you apply using Common App."

WAIVERS — For international students, acceptance of the waiver is the college's decision. Common App addresses the international case directly, and its answer is a careful one: "International students may be eligible for a Common App fee waiver. Each college has their own policies." Its support text spells out the spread of outcomes — colleges may charge different fees to US and international students, some may accept the Common App waiver only for US students, some may not accept it for any students, and some offer their own fee waivers instead. The general rule sits above all of it: "Our member colleges have varying policies on who can use the fee waiver." So the waiver is worth requesting if you meet a qualification — but it must be verified college by college, in the application or on the college's website, and a shortlist budget should not assume it until each college has confirmed it accepts the waiver from international applicants.

WAIVERS — Graduate applications have no common waiver system. Graduate admissions are run by individual universities and their departments, outside the Common App, so there is no platform-level waiver to request. Where a graduate programme waives its application fee, it does so under its own policy — announced on its admissions pages, offered to defined categories of applicants, or granted on request to the programme. EducationUSA's finance guidance reflects this decentralised picture: fee relief appears in its material as one of the "special opportunities" individual institutions offer, not as a scheme with central rules. The only accurate instruction is therefore procedural — check each graduate programme's application page for a waiver provision before paying, and ask the programme directly if none is published. Any website presenting a universal graduate fee-waiver route is describing something the system does not contain.

SECTION 02Scholarships: Merit, Need, and Where the Information Lives

STRUCTURE — University aid comes in two broad logics, and EducationUSA defines the need logic in one sentence. Merit-based aid is awarded for achievement — academic record, talent or accomplishment — without reference to the family's finances. Need-based aid runs the other way: it is calculated from the family's position. EducationUSA's undergraduate guidance states the mechanism exactly: "general financial aid amounts are based on the difference between college costs and what your family can afford." That single sentence explains most of how undergraduate funding works in the United States. A university with need-based aid first fixes its own total cost, then assesses what the family can contribute, and any aid it offers fills some or all of the gap between the two. It also explains why the same student can receive a large award from one university and nothing from another: the costs differ, the assessment differs, and the university's willingness and capacity to fill the gap differ. Neither logic is a national programme; both are institutional decisions, made from institutional funds, under institutional rules.

STRUCTURE — Aid and admission are one process, not two. EducationUSA's finance overview warns students to plan early for a structural reason: "Applications for financial aid go together with applications for admission." A funding application is therefore not something added after an admission offer arrives. It runs on the admission timetable, with the admission deadlines — which is why EducationUSA repeats, at both undergraduate and graduate level, the instruction to "start your financial planning as early as possible", and why its graduate guidance notes that "deadlines for scholarships and grants can be as early as 18 months before your program start date". A student who applies for admission and thinks about money afterwards has, at many universities, already missed the funding round attached to that admission cycle.

EXPECTATION — Most awards are partial, and EducationUSA says so in terms. The sentence every applicant should read before building a plan around scholarships appears in both EducationUSA's undergraduate and graduate finance pages: "most scholarship awards may cover only part of the total educational and living costs and may not be available to first-year international students." Two disciplines follow. First, a scholarship is normally a contribution to a budget, not the budget itself — the remainder has to come from family funds, further sources or a loan, and Section 07 builds the budget on that assumption. Secondly, availability to international students is itself a filter: some awards that exist for US students do not extend to international applicants, and some do not open until after the first year. Whether a named scholarship is open to you, at what value, and for which years, is stated — if it is stated anywhere reliably — on the awarding university's financial-aid pages.

WHERE IT LIVES — Scholarship information has exactly two trustworthy homes. The first is the university itself: each institution's financial-aid and international-admissions pages carry its own scholarships, eligibility, deadlines and application method, and EducationUSA directs students to institutions' websites for the specifics throughout its finance guidance, noting that it maintains a listing of "special opportunities and financial aid provisions that U.S. higher education institutions offer international students, such as scholarships, in-state tuition benefits, waived application fees and deadlines". The second home is the official advising network: EducationUSA advisers "have access to resources that help you learn about scholarships and new programs" and "share current information about financial aid opportunities", and at graduate level advisers help students "identify scholarships and new programs" in their field. Those two homes — the university's pages and the State Department's advising network — are the whole reliable map. Section 08 deals with what fills the space outside them.

SECTION 03"Need-Blind" and "Need-Aware": Two Words Worth Understanding Precisely

CONCEPT — These are descriptions of how a university runs its own admission process, not categories in any official US system. No government body classifies universities as need-blind or need-aware, and EducationUSA's guidance does not organise aid around the labels. They are terms universities use about themselves, and they are worth understanding because families build strategies around them — but they should be held at the level of what they literally describe. A university calling its admission need-blind is saying that an applicant's financial circumstances do not bear on the decision whether to admit them; the admission decision and the money decision are separated. A university that is need-aware (sometimes "need-sensitive") is saying the opposite: ability to pay may be one of the factors weighed, typically when the admission decision is made for an applicant who would need substantial aid.

CONCEPT — Neither label says anything about how much aid follows. This is the confusion the labels generate. Need-blind describes the admission decision only; it does not promise that the university will meet the admitted student's full need, and a need-aware university may in practice fund an admitted international student generously. The two questions — will my finances affect admission, and if admitted, how much of the gap will the university fill — are independent, and each university answers them separately, in its own financial-aid pages. Because the labels are self-descriptions, they also change: a university's policy for international applicants may differ from its policy for US applicants, and may be revised between admission cycles. Our position on this article is deliberate: we do not print a list of "need-blind universities for international students", because such lists circulate for years after the policies they summarise have changed. The only version of a university's policy that can support a decision is the one on that university's website for your admission cycle, read in full — the aid calculation itself still works the way Section 02 described, from the difference between the college's costs and what the family can afford.

SECTION 04Graduate Funding: Fellowships and Assistantships

STRUCTURE — Graduate funding is a different system from undergraduate aid, and it is run by departments. EducationUSA's graduate finance page names the instruments directly: "The main types of U.S. university assistance are fellowships, teaching assistantships, research assistantships, and administrative assistantships." A fellowship is an award of funding attached to the student's study itself. The assistantships are different in kind: they are work — teaching, research or administrative duties performed for the department — carrying funding in return. EducationUSA describes the exchange plainly: students should "find out if the institutions in which you are interested have opportunities for you to work as a graduate teaching or research assistant in exchange for a tuition waiver and/or a stipend", adding that "this is very common at the PhD level". Note the shape of that sentence, because it is the accurate outline of what assistantships bundle: a waiver of tuition, a stipend toward living costs, or both — combined differently by different universities and departments. Any specific stipend amount quoted outside a university's own offer is not a figure this article will repeat, because no official text sets one; the number that governs your case arrives in the funding terms of your own admission offer.

STRUCTURE — Funding decisions are made with admission, by the people you will study under. Because assistantships and fellowships are departmental resources, the department is where they are allocated. EducationUSA's advice to graduate applicants is unusually direct about the human route into that process: "Contact professors in your department of interest at U.S. institutions since they play an important role in identifying and choosing grant and funding recipients in their departments." The same guidance warns applicants to research funding before applying — to "research independent scholarships and identify universities with financial aid in your field of study" before submitting — because a funding decision is commonly made as part of the admission decision, from the application the department already has. A separate funding application exists at some universities and not at others; that, too, is stated on the programme's own pages. What is uniform is the timing: funding is competed for at the application stage, not negotiated after arrival.

TERMS — An assistantship is an appointment, and its terms deserve reading like one. EducationUSA closes its graduate-funding guidance with a sentence that functions as the official caution for the whole section: "Make sure you understand the responsibilities involved and level of funding before accepting an award." An assistantship normally carries defined duties — teaching sections, laboratory or research work, administrative support — and the funding attached to it is the consideration for that work. Two students holding "assistantships" at different universities may hold materially different packages: different duty loads, different combinations of tuition waiver and stipend, different durations and renewal conditions. The offer documents from the department are the authoritative text, and questions about them belong to the department and the university's graduate school — our after-admission guide picks up the sequence from the point an offer, with or without funding, is in hand: Your next steps, from offer to I-20.

SECTION 05External Scholarships and the Government Route

STRUCTURE — External funding exists, and EducationUSA's own list of sources defines its legitimate shape. Beyond the university itself, EducationUSA's graduate guidance tells students to "identify sources of financial aid, including home government scholarships, U.S. government assistance, private sources and international organizations, U.S. universities, and loans". Every item on that list is a channel with an institution behind it — a government, an organisation, a university — publishing its own scheme, eligibility and application. That is the test any external scholarship should pass: it belongs to a named institution, is published on that institution's own channels, and is applied for through them. Government and embassy channels sit at the top of this hierarchy because their schemes are gazetted, audited and announced through official missions — and because the advising network that points students to them, EducationUSA, is itself a U.S. Department of State network.

FLAGSHIP — For Indian applicants, the Fulbright-Nehru fellowships are the principal US-government-linked route, administered in India by USIEF. The United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF) runs the Fulbright-Nehru competitions for Indian citizens. Its Master's Fellowships are, in USIEF's own words, "designed for highly motivated individuals who demonstrate outstanding leadership qualities, have completed the equivalent of a U.S. bachelor's degree, have at least three years professional work experience, and are committed to return and contribute to their communities in India." Two features of that framing matter for planning. First, this is not a fresh-graduate scheme: the three years of professional work experience is an eligibility requirement, and applications are invited in specified fields of study — the fellowship page lists fields including Economics, Environmental Science/Studies, Higher Education Administration, International Affairs, International Legal Studies, Journalism and Mass Communication, Public Administration, Public Health, and Urban and Regional Planning. Secondly, the fellowships "are awarded for up to two years to pursue a master's degree at U.S. colleges and universities" in those fields.

TERMS — What Fulbright-Nehru funds is stated, including its limits. USIEF lists the grant benefits as "J-1 visa support, round-trip economy class air travel from fellow's home city to the host institution in the U.S., funding for tuition and fees, living and related costs, and accident and sickness coverage per U.S. Government guidelines." The same page states the boundaries with equal clarity: "The Fulbright-Nehru Master's Fellowships provide no financial support for dependents", and "USIEF funding may not cover all costs and the fellow may need to supplement grant benefits with other resources." Placement also works differently from an ordinary application: placement of successful candidates is handled by the Institute of International Education (IIE) in New York, and recommended candidates "are not required to apply to U.S. institutions on their own" — IIE applies on their behalf. Competition cycles, deadlines and field lists change between years, and this article deliberately prints none of them: the current cycle's terms live on USIEF's fellowship pages at usief.org.in, and that is the only place from which an application should be built. Note also that a Fulbright-Nehru fellow travels on the exchange-visitor route (the grant provides J-1 visa support), not on an F-1 — it is a parallel path to US study, not a funding top-up inside an F-1 application.

APPLICATION COSTS — Official help with the costs of applying also exists, in some countries, through EducationUSA itself. EducationUSA operates an Opportunity Funds programme, supported by the U.S. Department of State, which its centre pages describe as assisting "highly qualified students who are likely to be awarded full financial support from accredited U.S. universities but need more financial resources to cover the up-front costs related to applying and obtaining admission". The costs its centres list as covered include standardised examinations and score reports, university application fees, translations and administrative costs required for applications, and — once admitted — visa-related and travel costs; the programme does not cover tuition. Availability is country by country and cohort by cohort, and selection is made by the local EducationUSA centre. There is no central application portal to link and no guarantee any given centre runs the programme in a given year; the accurate step is to ask your EducationUSA advising centre — in India, the centres operated with USIEF — whether Opportunity Funds or an equivalent local scheme is open, and to treat any third party offering to "arrange" it for a fee as failing the test in Section 08.

SECTION 06Education Loans: Where They Fit in the Timeline

TIMELINE — A loan's role at the application stage is evidence; its role later is money. This sequencing is the single most misunderstood part of study funding, so we state it before the detail. When a university has admitted you and is preparing your Form I-20, it must first be satisfied about how your studies will be paid for. The State Department's student-visa guidance shows the shape of the stage: the school accepts your enrolment, and the I-20 follows from that acceptance — and at the visa interview itself, the officer may ask for evidence of "how you will pay all educational, living and travel costs". A bank's loan sanction letter belongs to this documentary stage: it is the lender's recorded commitment to lend, produced while the university (and later the visa process) tests whether the funding behind your plan is real. The loan proceeds themselves are a later event — disbursement follows the lender's own process and the stage of study it finances. An applicant who expects loan money in hand at the I-20 stage, or who treats a sanction letter as if it were a bank balance, has the sequence inverted; our F-1 visa financial documents for India works through how funding evidence is presented, and our F-1 visa education loans without collateral covers lender types, sanction and disbursement in full. This article does not repeat that material; it fixes the loan's position in the order of events: shortlist realistically (Section 07's budget), secure admission, use the sanction as evidence at the financial stage, and plan cash flow around disbursement happening afterwards.

BUDGET INTERFACE — A loan fills a measured gap; it should not define the plan. Section 02's aid logic and Section 07's budget meet here. The honest sequence is to compute the full cost of attendance, subtract what the family can genuinely contribute and what scholarships or assistantships actually cover, and let the remainder — not an amount a lender is willing to advertise — determine the loan sought. EducationUSA's planning order makes the same point by placing personal funds first: at both undergraduate and graduate level, its guidance begins with assessing how much you and your family can provide — "annual family income, family assets, your own earnings, and other sources" — and treats loans as one source among several in its funding list. A loan arranged before the budget exists is a commitment in search of a purpose; a loan arranged after it is a sized instrument with a defined job.

SECTION 07Building the Full Budget

THE CORE FIGURE — Cost of attendance is the university's own total, and it is wider than tuition. EducationUSA's budgeting rule is the starting point for both levels of study: "your overall costs include tuition, fees, and living expenses. Actual costs vary by institution, so refer to each institution's website for specific costs." Each university publishes its cost of attendance — its official total for a year of study, combining tuition and fees with its estimate of living costs — and that published total, for your university and your programme, is the only total with standing in the process: it is the figure around which the I-20's financial stage and the visa interview's funding questions revolve. EducationUSA adds one planning correction worth applying to every multi-year budget: "estimate that tuition costs typically increase each year". A four-year or two-year plan priced entirely at first-year tuition is understated by construction.

THE FULL STACK — A complete application-stage budget has four layers. Working from the official texts above, the layers are these. First, the costs of applying itself (Section 01): application fees per university, test fees and score-report charges, and credential evaluation where a university requires it — net of any fee waiver actually confirmed. Secondly, the first year's cost of attendance at the university you will attend, taken from its published figure — this is the amount the financial stage will test, because the school must be satisfied about funding before the I-20 sequence completes and because the visa interview can ask how all "educational, living and travel costs" will be paid. Thirdly, the funding stack against that year: family contribution as honestly assessed, scholarships and assistantships at the values the university has actually awarded (not hoped for), external awards actually granted, and a loan sized to the remainder. Fourthly, the years after the first: the same cost of attendance projected forward with EducationUSA's annual-increase estimate, against funding whose renewal terms you have read — because an award that covers year one only is a year-one solution, and EducationUSA's warning that most awards "may cover only part of the total educational and living costs" applies to the whole degree, not just its first year.

REALITY CHECK — The proof-of-funds stage is where budgets are audited. Every earlier section converges here. The university's financial review and the consular interview are not budgeting exercises; they are verification exercises, conducted against documents — which is why our F-1 visa financial documents for India exists as the companion to this one. The discipline this article asks for is simply that the numbers presented at that stage are the numbers from your own budget: the university's published costs, your family's assessed contribution, awards in writing, and a loan sanction that matches the gap. A plan assembled that way has nothing to reconcile under questioning; a plan assembled from borrowed figures — a scholarship assumed, a stipend invented, a fee "everyone pays" — has to be defended at exactly the moment it can least afford to be.

SECTION 08The Scam Patterns That Surround Study Funding

PATTERN — The "guaranteed scholarship". Sections 02 and 04 established how scholarships and assistantships actually come into existence: they are awarded by universities and departments, through admission-linked processes, from institutional funds. It follows that no intermediary can guarantee one. A scholarship is a decision made by an institution about its own money; an agent who promises that decision in advance — and especially an agent who charges for the promise — is selling something that is not theirs to sell. Treat the word "guaranteed", attached to any competitive scholarship or assistantship, as disqualifying on its own.

PATTERN — Paid scholarship lists and application fees for free money. The second pattern monetises information. Scholarship information, as Section 02 set out, lives in two free places: the universities' own financial-aid pages and the official advising network, whose advisers share current financial-aid information as part of a public service. A service charging you for a list of scholarships is charging for what those channels provide without a fee — and charging an "application" or "processing" fee to release a scholarship inverts the real system's direction of payment, in which money flows from institutions to students through published schemes like those in Section 05. If a scheme cannot be found on the website of the institution said to offer it, the scheme — not your search — is what has failed.

PATTERN — Funding promises from institutions that should not be making them. The third pattern attaches funding promises to the university itself — typically an obscure institution whose generous "scholarship" exists mainly to make its total price seem survivable. The official check is mechanical: a student visa requires study at a school certified for the purpose. The State Department's guidance is that "the first step to studying in the United States is apply to a SEVP-approved school in the United States", and DHS's Study in the States site provides the school search for verifying that a school is SEVP-certified. A "university" that cannot be found there cannot issue the I-20 your visa depends on, whatever its funding brochure says — and an institution whose name resembles a famous university's, but is not that university, is the oldest variant of the pattern. Verify the school first; discuss its funding second; pay it nothing until both checks pass.

THE STANDING RULE — Verify at the source, in this order. Every funding claim in this article can be re-performed by the reader, and that is the point of the article's method. University money: read it on the university's financial-aid pages. Waiver mechanics: read them in Common App's own support text or the college's. Government schemes: read them on the administering body's own site — USIEF for Fulbright-Nehru, your EducationUSA centre for advising and Opportunity Funds. School legitimacy: check SEVP certification on Study in the States. A claim that survives all four checks is a plan. A claim that exists only in a brochure, a message thread or an agent's assurance is marketing, and the sections above have shown what the real system looks like so that the difference is visible.

FAQFrequently Asked Questions

Official references and verification status

Verified on 1 November 2026 against: EducationUSA's Finance Your Studies overview and its undergraduate and graduate finance pages (costs vary by institution and are to be taken from each institution's website; overall costs comprise tuition, fees and living expenses; the budgeting estimate that tuition typically increases each year; aid amounts based on the difference between college costs and what the family can afford; most scholarship awards covering only part of total costs and possibly unavailable to first-year international students; financial-aid applications running together with admission applications; the four main types of university assistance — fellowships, teaching assistantships, research assistantships and administrative assistantships; assistantships exchanged for a tuition waiver and/or a stipend and described as very common at PhD level; the role of department professors in choosing funding recipients; scholarship deadlines as early as 18 months before the programme start; and the recognised funding sources including home government scholarships, US government assistance and loans); Common App's official fee-waiver support article, read in full (the waiver's purpose and qualifications; the request route through Profile with a confirming signature; no fee payable to colleges that accept it; and the international-student position — eligibility possible, each college's own policies, with some colleges accepting it only for US students, some not at all, and some offering their own); USIEF's Fulbright-Nehru Master's Fellowships page (the fellowship's design for applicants with a bachelor's-equivalent degree, at least three years of professional work experience and a commitment to return to India; awards for up to two years in the listed fields; benefits comprising J-1 visa support, round-trip economy air travel, funding for tuition and fees, living and related costs, and accident and sickness coverage; no financial support for dependants; the warning that funding may not cover all costs; and placement handled by IIE rather than by candidates applying on their own); the State Department's student-visa page (application to a SEVP-approved school as the first step, with the Form I-20 following acceptance; and the interview evidence item "how you will pay all educational, living and travel costs"); and EducationUSA centre pages for the Opportunity Funds programme (a Department of State-supported programme covering up-front application costs — examinations, score reports, application fees, translations — for highly qualified students with financial need, not covering tuition). Three items are flagged rather than stated cleanly. First, the Fulbright-Nehru page read for this article was USIEF's page for the 2025–2026 competition cycle: the programme's design, eligibility frame and benefit structure are stated from it, but all cycle-specific matter — deadlines, the current field list as it may be revised, and application links — is deliberately excluded from the article and referred to USIEF's live pages. Secondly, Section 03's account of "need-blind" and "need-aware" is a concept explanation of terms universities apply to themselves; no official US body defines or certifies these labels, the article says so in its text, and no university's policy is asserted anywhere in it. Thirdly, Section 06's account of loan sanction and disbursement timing states the sequencing as it is treated in this site's own verified education-loan guide, which is linked rather than re-verified here. Deliberately not printed: no application-fee amount (none exists generally — fees are set per university), no test or credential-evaluation prices (set by providers and agencies, and outside the official texts read), no assistantship stipend amounts (set by departments in individual offers), and no scholarship values (institutional and cycle-specific). A check of the FTC's scholarship-scam guidance could not be completed in this pass; Section 08 is therefore built only from the positive structure of the official system as verified above — how funding is actually awarded, and through which channels — and asserts no external scam statistics.

• EducationUSA — Finance Your U.S. Studies (aid runs with admission; costs and provisions vary by institution)
• EducationUSA — Financing Undergraduate Study (need calculation; partial-award warning; adviser resources)
• EducationUSA — Financing Graduate Study (assistantships and fellowships; department funding; funding sources)
• Common App — What is a Common App fee waiver? (qualifications, request route, international-student policies)
• USIEF — Fulbright-Nehru Master's Fellowships (eligibility, fields, grant benefits and limits)
• U.S. Department of State — Student Visa (SEVP-approved school and Form I-20; evidence of how all costs will be paid)
• DHS Study in the States — Students and the Form I-20 (the I-20's place in the sequence)

General educational information, not individualized legal or financial advice. Follow official instructions and consult your designated school official (DSO) or a qualified U.S. immigration attorney for case-specific questions.

General information only. This guide is based on official sources publicly available and checked on the date shown on this page. Visa rules change, and consular and USCIS officers decide every case on its own facts — nothing here is a confirmation or a guarantee for your individual case, and this is not legal advice. Always confirm the current requirement on the official page linked in this guide before you act, and consider a qualified immigration attorney for your specific situation.