President Folt recently interviewed an Indian newspaper that sells the monetary resources USC provides to foreign students. But they are enough.
Earlier this year, President Carol Folt and I swapped places: She visited my hometown of Mumbai, soaking up the sun, while I hid from the rain in Los Angeles to memorize the reasons for the U. S. -China industrial war. Folt was interviewed via The Education Times, a weekly supplement of The Times of India, where she spoke about the availability of monetary resources for Indian scholars to attend USC.
“My purpose is to expand more investment resources to make our university more available to talented scholars from around the world,” Folt said. “We also inspire our alumni and Indian business network to contribute to a new fund we have set up to help provide more monetary aid to Indian academics. “
As a full-tuition paying student, I appreciate that Folt recognizes that we would also like more monetary support. But at the same time, he pointed to existing resources that USC provides to foreign students, such as merit scholarships and on-campus jobs. However, he does not specify that such programs have a very limited impact.
In a post to the Daily Trojan, the Office of Admissions said that the Merit Scholarships are open to all foreign students, unless they are those with express staffing or administration requirements.
“Express scholarships exist for foreign students, adding their eligibility to broader merit scholarships at the university level (such as those for Administrator, President, and Dean),” the Office of Admissions wrote.
USC did not provide me with the exact number of the 760 Merit Scholars from the class of 2026 who were foreign students, and more particularly Indian foreign students. Instead, USC Public Relations referred me to public documents that did not include this data. However, Nishka Manghnani, a second-year design student and merit student, remembers interacting only with four other merit scholars who were not U. S. citizens.
Even taking into account their potential memory errors, it is highly likely that while foreign scholars accounted for 18% of the class of 2026, less than 18% of the scholars deserving of that class are foreign scholars. It turns out that Folt is exaggerating the importance of merit scholarships for Indian foreign scholars.
What’s more, while it’s not up to foreign scholars to locate an assignment on campus, it is difficult: most of the assignments that can be done at ConnectSC are for cooperative scholars, and due to federal regulations and university policy, foreign scholars are ineligible for monetary aid or alternatively.
“International academics deserve to be able to have the same opportunities in terms of work, because other people like themselves or have an additional source of income,” Manghnani said. “We don’t deserve to be harder just because we’re foreign academics. “
While I’d like to say that the feeling of lack of money is a recent issue, several USC Reddit threads that focus on this point say otherwise. When asked how foreign scholars can afford USC, one Reddit user responded by saying that his parents had sold their house.
“You have to settle for the fact that universities in general make money off foreign students,” wrote Reddit user Stevenshum on the r/USC subreddit.
Perhaps that’s why Folt expressly visited “famous parents” and their friends (who don’t even have children at USC) rather than all USC parents in Mumbai on his recent trip: USC needs to attract the rich and famous kids who can get full tuition.
Overall, I don’t think USC is intentionally seeking to harm its foreign scholars. Their moves may be helping foreign scholars financially, but the effects are limited and do not have the desired impact. USC wishes to reevaluate and modify the resources it provides to foreign scholars. After all, resources that look glamorous on paper or in interviews deserve to look glamorous in real life as well.
Edhita Singhal is an Indian sophomore who writes about her experiences as a foreign student in her “Foreign Footprints” column, which appears every Tuesday.
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