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 equipped to succeed and create lasting, positive change in the world.
Most UWC national committees across the globe are run by volunteers. This volunteer network ensures that UWC’s unique selection process is possible. With selection activities taking place in over 150 countries and territories, we actively look for promising young students, many of whom would otherwise never dream of the opportunity that a 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 now offer scholarships to students younger than the typical 16-18 age group through “pre-IB” programmes, which give additional support to students needing help before tackling the academically challenging IBDP. As the UWC education model diversifies and expands to include a wider age range, this will be an important area for scholarship growth. Colleges offering 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, with several others 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
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 genuinely engage with those they find 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 truly different despite their shared 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.
