Not every student who receives financial access to an elite international school is called a “scholarship student.” In many international schools, at least two groups of students benefit from significant institutional support:
These arrangements are not identical. Faculty tuition remission is typically part of an employment package; bursaries are usually framed as access or inclusion. Still, both groups sit in classrooms they could not access through full-fee payment alone. Both benefit from institutional generosity. Yet only one group is routinely named, and marked, through the language of “scholarship.” And that language is never neutral.
The Insider Problem
I write this as someone within the system.
I am a faculty parent. My own children benefit from the generosity of an international school every day. Their access is made possible by my employment, institutional policy, and a global education economy that treats faculty tuition benefits as normal.
Yet my children are not usually described as “scholarship students.” They are staff kids. Faculty kids. EdKids. That language carries inherited legitimacy: proximity, familiarity, and assumed belonging. Their parents attend meetings, coach teams, write reports, supervise trips, and contribute to the daily life of the institution. Their presence is folded into the ordinary story of the school, and so is their belonging.
Bursary students are often positioned differently. They may be introduced through the language of opportunity, uplift, promise, or benevolence. These words are not always wrong, but they are rarely innocent. They can turn a child into a symbol before that child is allowed to simply be a student.
Access Is Not Arrival
Scholarship and bursary programs can be among the most meaningful ways international schools widen access. In some cases, they genuinely transform life trajectories.
The problem begins when access is treated as the finish line. A seat in the classroom is not the same as belonging to the school. A tuition waiver does not automatically provide social capital. A scholarship letter does not erase the informal economy of student life: birthday parties, branded clothing, graduation trips, weekend plans, devices, exam fees, and extracurricular activities that quietly assume a baseline of wealth.
This became vivid for me during a Grade 6 discussion about why schools offer scholarships. I said, “Nothing is free,” even scholarships. One student asked, without malice, “Is it because the country’s so poor?” It was a revealing question, not because the student was wrong to ask it, but because it exposed a story children often absorb before adults formally teach it. Scholarships are frequently narrated as generosity flowing in one direction.
The school gives.
The student receives.
The community celebrates.
But international schools also receive. Scholarship students can provide institutions with moral legitimacy: a more compelling story about access, diversity, and connection to the host country. Their presence can soften the contradiction of elite schooling in contexts where inequality often sits just beyond the campus gates. That tension deserves more honesty.
Where the Problem Lives
The scholarship problem rarely appears in the admissions letter. It appears in the life that follows. It appears when a student can attend the school but not the trip. When they can wear the uniform but cannot enter the weekend social world where peer belonging is built. When everyone says, “we treat all students the same,” while ignoring that sameness becomes a burden when students do not share the same resources.
The question is not whether elite international schools should have scholarships. They should. The deeper question is whether our schools are willing to examine the hierarchy that can remain after the scholarship is awarded. Who gets to be simply one of our students? And who never quite does?
References
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education.
Geyer, K., & Walton, E. (2015). Schooling in the shadow of benevolence: The experience of scholarship recipients in affluent schools. South African Journal of Higher Education.
Martinez, C. (2026). De/reterritorializing elite notions of a Brazilian international school: The Janelas Abertas scholarship program. Current Issues in Comparative Education.
Robertson, R. (2024). What Scholarship Boarders Really Need: A Case Study in an Elite South African School.
Wu, S., & Wang, Y. (2026). Between localization and internationalization: How the global international school industry establishes legitimacy? Globalisation, Societies and Education.
Zilber, E. (2016, December 15). “EdKids” in the international school community: Who cares? The International Educator.
Elijah Abdullah is the head of social studies and International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme/Diploma Programme educator at the American International School of Mozambique. His work explores how systems of equity, belonging, and power operate within international education. He writes on the intersection of school culture and global inequality.
