Scholarship Aid

Keeping Cornell within reach of the best and brightest

Thanks to a sweeping new financial aid plan, Cornell students can choose careers based on realizing their dreams, rather than on repaying their debt.

Cornell now replaces loans with grants and scholarships for students from families making less than $75,000 annually. The plan also caps need-based loans and eliminates or reduces the parental contribution for even more families.

It's the right thing to do. But it does present challenges. Compared with other schools with aggressive aid plans, Cornell has a larger student body and enrolls a greater percentage of lower-income students. This means that Cornell must spend more to ease students’ financial burden. However, it also means that Cornell has the chance to change many more lives.

To fund the initiative, Cornell is reallocating funds, increasing its endowment payout, and seeking new scholarship gifts for domestic and international students. An additional $125 million for scholarships has been added to the campaign goal.

Types of support

Cornell welcomes gifts of all sizes. Select opportunities are described below.

Cornell Annual Fund for Student Aid: all gift sizes. Gifts go directly into scholarship funds for high-achieving undergraduate students. Learn more about the Annual Fund, or support student aid now with an online gift.

Annual Named Term Scholarship Fund: $10,000. Term scholarships help to fund one student for one year. Challenge matching funds will add $2,500 to each $7,500 gift to establish a $10,000 term scholarship fund.

Named Scholarship Fund: $100,000. Through a challenge match, donors may endow and name a scholarship with a $75,000 gift instead of a $100,000 gift. You can choose to establish a fund in your name, or honor a family member, friend, or mentor.

Cornell Tradition Scholarship: $500,000. The Cornell Tradition program awards approximately 600 fellowships each year to Cornell undergraduates who have significant work experience, make meaningful contributions to campus and/or community service, and maintain a high level of academic achievement.

Tang International Scholarship Challenge: $750,000. Thanks to Trustee Martin Y. Tang ’70, each gift of $750,000 or more will be matched with $250,000. The goal is to create 12 international student scholarship endowments of $1 million each.

Visit the gift guide to learn more about these and many other types of support.