SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAMS

Every year, French higher education institutions accept thousands of undergraduate and graduate students from foreign countries to pursue their Master and PhD degree. Students may also get scholarship and grants to cover their living expense and registration fee.  Here are some of the scholarships you may be interested in:

Eiffel Scholarship Program of Excellence

This scholarship is provided by Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE)  for Master or PhD degree. The application for this scholarship is quite unique. Only the education institution can fill the application, so students have to contact and get admission from the institution to be eligible for this scholarship. After being accepted, students have to send all the required documents (in addition to documents provided for admission) to the institution, so application files for Eiffel scholarship (prepared by the institution) is completed. You can find further information about the Eiffel scholarship in Campus France official website.

French Government Scholarship (BGF)

As the name suggested, this scholarship is provided by the French government and it is also dedicated for higher education program (Master and PhD degree). The duration of the scholarship can be varied depending on your program, but normally it lasts 10 months for master degree and 18 moths for PhD. Application is generally open in January and close in March, so it is strongly recommend to prepare all the requirements in advance. Please refer to BGF official website for further information on eligibility and required documents.

Erasmus Plus

ERASMUS (EuRopean Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students) is a program aims to promote students mobility between universities in Europe as well as from other countries outside Europe. Grants are provided to support students for exchange program, master degree (exchange/full) and PhD (exchange/full). Application period, required documents and eligibility for this scholarship are different from one to another program. So it is recommend to check your suitable program for more details. You can find a list of Joint Master Degree support by Erasmus program here.

Some Tips for Application preparation

Proof of language proficiency

DELF B2 is normally required if your master/PhD program is in French. However, recently many French university also proposes the international program in English, so IELTS or TOFEL can be also be used if you are admitted into an international program.

Admission from a French institution

This is the most important point and also the most time consuming, so it is strongly suggested that you start contacting and applying for admission in French education institutions from October. You can apply to a few schools at the same time, but you have to decide at the end which you will choose to pursue your degree.
(If you don’t know any schools in France, you can ask your professors or Head of the department for some suggestions.)

Prepare administrative documents

It is also important to notice that in most of the cases the required documents must be in French. So get all the administrative documents translated beforehand rather than rushing at the last minute.