Support Us
Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, over 80% of national committee selected UWC students receive a scholarship. This support allows UWC to continue to select students based on their potential and merit regardless of their background, race, gender or ability to pay. Our students enter as idealists and graduate well-equipped to succeed and make lasting, positive change to the world.
Most UWC national committees across the world are run by volunteers. Our volunteer network ensures that UWC’s unique selection around the world is possible. With selection activities taking place in over 150 countries and territories, we actively look for promising young students, many of which would otherwise never dream of the opportunity that UWC education can provide.
Why Support UWC
UWC is committed to ensuring that as many students as possible have the opportunity to experience a UWC education regardless of national, socioeconomic, cultural, racial or religious background. UWC achieves this through selection based on potential and merit and through the provision of scholarships. To continue this work, UWC relies on donations from alumni and other individuals, trusts, foundations, companies and governments.
"A UWC scholarship is a great investment in society. We are developing a global community of leaders who are aware of the world’s needs, steeped in the nuances and dynamics of international and intercultural cooperation and equipped with the mindset, skills, sense of agency and the global network to make a tangible difference in the world."
Pre-IB scholarships
Several UWC schools and colleges are now offering scholarships to students younger than the typical 16-18 year old age group with special preparatory or “pre-IB” programs.
These programmes especially support students who need to receive additional support prior to be able to cope with the academically challenging IBDP. As the UWC education delivery model diversifies and grows to include a wider age range this will be an important growth area for scholarship support. Colleges which offer pre-IB scholarships include UWC South East Asia in Singapore, UWC Mahindra College in India, Waterford Kamhlaba UWC of Southern Africa in Eswatini and UWC Changshu China, while several others are developing similar initiatives.
Increasing scholarships for refugee students
The current global refugee crisis has captured our attention in recent years. The sheer scale of the crisis is overwhelming and it is difficult to know how best to help.
UWC as a family of schools and colleges has committed to contribute by greatly increasing our capacity to support students from refugee backgrounds. That is why we launched the UWC Refugee Initiative, which aims to bring up to 100 additional refugee students per year on full scholarships to UWC. This ambitious goal will require significant new funding, increasing support systems at our colleges, and the development of more strategic partnerships to ensure we are able to find candidates for whom UWC is the appropriate next step.
Diversity within countries
In addition to increasing the number of nationalities represented within our student bodies, we have a commitment to ensure that we represent the diversity within countries.
Young people from different ethnic, racial, political or religious backgrounds often live in close proximity without truly engaging, or in many cases without ever meeting, each other. At UWC we encourage young people to truly engage with those people who they find the most difficult to approach. This is why we actively seek to attract young people from opposing sides of conflicts, from ethnicities that do not freely mix or whose lives are just truly different despite their shared official nationality.
Selecting students from across the world
UWC currently has students from over 150 countries represented through our unique national committee system made up of 4,000 remarkable volunteers.
Yet there are still parts of the world where UWC is not currently represented. Steadily we are increasing our footprint in line with our diversity aspirations.
