PhD/Masters Funding for Armenian Students Abroad (2026)

Nearly every "scholarships for Armenian students" list still leads with the Luys Foundation, described as a thriving programme funding around 100 students a year at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, and similar schools. It isn't thriving. Luys stopped taking new applicants in 2018, and no public record shows it funding a new cohort since. Here's what actually happened to it, which two organizations genuinely stepped in, and what AGBU and Fulbright really offer an Armenian PhD or master's applicant today.

Luys Foundation: still on every list, not actually running since 2018

Luys was established in 2009 as a government-backed initiative, governed by a council that included Armenia's then-Prime Minister, to help Armenian citizens and diaspora Armenians (originally aged 18-40) cover the cost of attending a short, ranked list of the world's top universities, narrowed over time from a top-25 list to a top-10 list as resources tightened. Coverage from the period describes no obligation to return to Armenia for most of its run, and reporting puts its total reach at around 570 scholarships awarded over its first nine years. That changed abruptly in 2018: following that year's Velvet Revolution, the Luys Executive Board announced on 10 May 2018 that it was ending its activities. It agreed to keep funding the roughly 70 students already in the pipeline for at least one further year, but it did not extend scholarships to the 34 new applicants who had already been admitted for the 2018-2019 cycle. A US-registered nonprofit tied to the foundation, Luys Inc., reportedly retained its 501(c)(3) status afterward with an alumni-led board discussing a transition, but we found no documentation that it ever reopened applications or ran a new funding round, under that name or any other, in 2019, 2020, or any year since. If a page you're reading cites Luys as something you can apply to now, in 2026, assume it's describing the pre-2018 programme unless it names a specific, dated current call.

My Step Foundation: the emergency fix that became an ongoing programme

My Step Foundation exists because of that 2018 collapse. Founded that June by Anna Hakobyan, spouse of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, it launched by raising roughly $517,000 (reported by Armenpress, with support from donors including AGBU) specifically to cover first-year tuition for 18 of the students left stranded when Luys withdrew its offers, plus four others. It didn't stop there: Armenpress later reported two further public ceremonies, one awarding scholarships to 54 students newly accepted to leading global universities, a second to 45 more, both attended by a Deputy or sitting Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sports. Reporting describes its scholarship work as prioritizing fields on Armenia's development priority list, naming data science and healthcare management among them, and describes recipients as agreeing to apply what they learn back in Armenia, a stated expectation rather than a documented legal repayment mechanism like the compulsory return-and-compensation clauses some other countries in this series attach to government scholarships. What we could not verify from available sources is a 2024, 2025, or 2026 cohort, current eligibility rules, or a live application portal, so confirm its current status directly before assuming last decade's reporting still describes today's programme.

AGBU's scholarship: real, current, and genuinely documented, but supplementary

The Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) runs the clearest, most currently-verifiable funding route covered here. It offers a US Scholarship (for study at institutions inside the United States) and a separate International Scholarship (for study outside both Armenia and the US), both open to full-time graduate students, doctoral candidates included, at institutions AGBU describes as "highly selective." The detail most generic lists miss: AGBU scholarships are explicitly not primary funding. Both application tracks require that a major portion of your tuition and living costs already be covered by other means, your own resources, your institution, or another award, before AGBU's grant supplements the remainder. Per AGBU's own announcement dated 17 February 2026 for the 2026-2027 cycle, awards go up to $10,000 per student, with a limited number of up to $20,000 for exceptional candidates, and minimum GPA requirements were raised to 3.7 for US-based graduate study and 3.5 for the International Scholarship and other categories, measured on the American grading scale. Armenian citizens are eligible applicants, but only for study outside Armenia, AGBU's own site states it does not fund Armenian citizens studying inside Armenia. A number of third-party scholarship-listing sites still quote the older $7,500 US-award ceiling and 3.5 GPA floor; those predate the February 2026 update. Applications for the International Scholarship have run on a cycle opening in January with a 1 June deadline and decisions posted around 15 August, and past recipients who still meet requirements can renew up to three times, confirm current dates on agbu.org directly since AGBU's own pages have shown some inconsistency on whether a given year's window is open.

Fulbright: a real route, but master's, not PhD

Armenia runs a Fulbright Foreign Student Program, administered with the US Embassy in Yerevan and placing successful applicants through the Institute of International Education (IIE), the same structure used in several other countries covered in this series. It has consistently funded master's degree study at US universities, not doctoral study. A related Fulbright-Hovnanian Grant, backed by the Hirair and Anna Hovnanian Foundation, has specifically targeted Armenian applicants pursuing a master's in STEM fields or entrepreneurship. Don't confuse either of these with Armenia's Fulbright Scholar Award, which does list both master's and doctoral levels, that award funds a research or teaching stay in Armenia for scholars applying from elsewhere, the reverse direction from an Armenian student seeking PhD funding abroad, not a route for you. The most recent Foreign Student Program deadline we could confirm closed 9 June 2023 for 2024-2025 study; we found no reliable confirmation of a 2026-2027 deadline, so check directly with the US Embassy in Armenia or Fulbright's own country page rather than assume the cycle repeats on the same date every year.

A practical search order

• Stop treating Luys Foundation as a live application option, confirm with its own channels (or the absence of any) before planning around it, and don't let it crowd out the routes that are actually documented as current.
• Check AGBU's eligibility quiz on agbu.org/scholarships directly for the current cycle's GPA floor, award cap, and deadline, and line up most of your funding elsewhere first, since AGBU is built to supplement, not replace, a primary funding source.
• Contact your target field's My Step Foundation channels or the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports directly to confirm whether a current scholarship cohort is open, rather than relying on 2018-2020 reporting.
• If a master's (not PhD) in the US fits your plans, check the Fulbright Foreign Student Program's current Armenia deadline directly with the US Embassy in Yerevan.

None of these routes replaces the step that actually gets you admitted: identifying a specific professor whose current research genuinely fits yours and reaching out before any scholarship deadline, since AGBU's supplementary model in particular assumes you already have an admission (and partial funding) in hand. GradScoutFunding is built for exactly that step: it searches for professors by field and country, confirms they're actively publishing rather than relying on a stale faculty page, and drafts a personalized outreach email grounded in one of their real recent papers, every draft is yours to review and send, nothing goes out automatically. The free tier gives 100 credits with no card required, and paid credit packs are one-time purchases that never expire.

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