Are all Masters PhD Programs Funded in North America?

Know the difference before applying

You Must Know

“Funding situation for Masters Ph.D in North America”

Lots of people get confused about the funding and scholarship situation in North America generally or Canada to be specific.

The concept here is that every graduate student pursuing Masters and Doctoral degree is funded one way or another.

Some students are on funding offered by local department while some are at scholarships. There are few who don’t have either so the universities help them out find some part-time work so that they become able to support themselves.

Funding vs Scholarship

  • What is funding? Funding is mostly offered by university and it’s in the form of TAship and RAship where you TA a course during Winter and Fall and RA during summers. TA salary comes directly from university while RA salary comes from your professor’s pocket.

  • What is scholarship? Other/third-party source to support yourself can be a scholarship. Talking about which, one should know that majority of them are only for permanent residents or Citizens of Canada. So if in any case, a scholarship comes up for international students, its going to be highly competitive. Scholarships are funds that come from third party like a company, governmentn or some welfare trust. So your university doesn’t have anything to do with your scholarship and so you have to apply for it independently. There are some local scholarships announced from university fund as well but normally they are of less value.

  • Conclusion: So this is how almost every graduate student (MS/Ph.D) in North America is studying for free. Students who don’t manage to score funding or scholarships are normally doing part-time job within campus or off-campus. Ratio of such students is very low, if university ranking is high 100% students are funded. Except that there are a several million opportunities available with very flexible timings especially designed for students.

P.S. Now stop worrying about how you’ll bear the expenses of tuition and start applying. :)

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