Most students default to the same rule: apply only to fully funded scholarships, skip everything else. It's an understandable instinct, but it quietly rules out options that might get you further than a long shot at a handful of ultra-competitive full awards.
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Explore Visa FinancingThe better question isn't "is it fully funded?" It's "does this actually close the specific gap I have?"
Fully Funded vs Partial Scholarship: What Each Term Means
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A genuinely fully funded scholarship covers tuition, a living stipend, and usually travel and health insurance, enough that you could realistically study without family savings or a separate loan. Scholarships like Chevening, Commonwealth, Gates Cambridge, and Stipendium Hungaricum fall into this category. These are also, predictably, the most competitive scholarships to win, because everyone wants the same thing you do.
What "Partial" Actually Covers
Partial funding ranges widely, and the range matters more than the label. The NL Scholarship (formerly Holland Scholarship), for example, provides €5,000 toward your first year at a Dutch university, a meaningful dent in costs, but nowhere near full tuition and living expenses for most programs. Other partial awards might cover tuition only, leaving living costs to you, or vice versa.
Some programs blur the line further. The Aga Khan Foundation's International Scholarship Programme, for instance, structures its award as 50% grant and 50% loan, meaning you eventually need to repay half the money you receive, starting six months after you finish your studies. That's a meaningfully different commitment than either a full scholarship or a straightforward partial grant, and it's easy to miss that detail if you only read the headline "scholarship" label.
The Real Question: What Gap Are You Closing?
If the honest answer is "I cannot study abroad at all without full funding," then a fully funded scholarship isn't optional; it's the only path, and it's worth the extra competition. Apply broadly across several full-funding options rather than pinning everything on one.
But if your actual situation is "I can partly self-fund, or I have some family support, and I need to close a specific gap," a partial scholarship can be both easier to win and sufficient for what you actually need. Competition for a €5,000 award is usually lower than competition for a scholarship offering €25,000, simply because fewer people bother applying for the smaller number.
A Practical Way to Decide
Work out your real number first: total cost of your target program, including tuition, living costs, flights, and visa fees, for the full duration. Then look at what you can realistically cover yourself, through savings, family support, or part-time work where your visa allows it.
Whatever's left is the gap a scholarship needs to close. If a partial award covers that gap, or most of it, it's doing its job, even if "fully funded" doesn't appear in its name. If the gap is still large after a partial award, you need either a full scholarship or a combination of smaller ones.
Combining Multiple Partial Awards
This is the strategy people underuse. Some students successfully stack a university-specific partial scholarship with a smaller external grant, closing the full gap through two or three awards rather than one. This takes more administrative effort, tracking separate applications and deadlines, but it often has better odds than competing for a single fully funded award against thousands of applicants.
If you go this route, check each award's rules on whether it can be combined with other funding; some have restrictions, others don't.
Reading the Fine Print on "Loan" Components
Before accepting any award described as part grant, part loan, understand exactly what you're committing to: the repayment start date, the interest rate if any, and what happens if your plans change (a job offer abroad, for instance, instead of returning home as expected). A "scholarship" with a loan component is still debt, and it should be evaluated with the same seriousness you'd apply to any loan.
The Bottom Line
Don't filter out an opportunity just because it isn't fully funded. Filter based on whether it closes your actual gap, what it would genuinely cost you (including any repayment obligation), and how it compares, realistically, to your odds at a more competitive fully funded programme. Sometimes the partial scholarship is the faster, more realistic path to the same destination.
Funding amounts, structures, and terms vary by programme and are updated regularly, so confirm the current details directly on each scholarship's official page before applying or accepting an offer.
