PhD/Masters Funding for Mongolian Students Abroad (2026)

Generic "scholarships for Mongolian students" listicles tend to recycle the same handful of global names, Chevening, Fulbright, Commonwealth, without checking whether each one actually applies to Mongolia specifically, or whether it funds PhD study at all. Mongolia isn't a Commonwealth country, Chevening and the main bilateral Fulbright track are Masters-level only, and the country's own flagship outbound scholarship is a comparatively new, selection-by-district program whose exact degree-level coverage we couldn't fully confirm from public reporting. Here's what the real sources actually say, and where the honest gaps are.

President's Scholar-2100: the flagship government route

Launched in 2021, President's Scholar-2100 is Mongolia's own outbound scholarship program, built to select outstanding students from each of the country's roughly 330 soums (districts) and each Ulaanbaatar khoroo (urban district) every year and send them to study at universities abroad. Selected students don't depart immediately, they first complete a preparatory program at the National University of Mongolia or the Mongolian University of Science and Technology. Mongolian embassy reporting on a 2023 cohort describes 260 students heading to 16 universities across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Canada, a genuinely substantial program by scale. What we couldn't confirm from available public reporting is the exact degree-level scope, whether it's aimed primarily at undergraduate study, extends to Masters and PhD applicants, or varies by cohort. If you're a prospective graduate applicant, treat this as the first program to ask Mongolia's Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Sports about directly, rather than assuming it covers doctoral study based on its scale alone.

Chevening and Fulbright: both real, both Masters-level

Mongolia is an eligible Chevening country through a dedicated Chevening/MES Partnership arrangement with Mongolia's education ministry, covering tuition, travel, and living costs for postgraduate study in the UK. Like every Chevening award globally, this is Masters-level only, there's no PhD track under the Chevening name anywhere, so don't read this as a PhD funding option.

Separately, there's an active bi-national Fulbright Foreign Student Program for Mongolian citizens, partly funded by the Government of Mongolia itself, supporting graduate study and research in the US. Eligibility notes describe a requirement of at least 1.5 years of full-time work experience plus a first university degree, and explicitly exclude Mongolians who already hold a US green card. The material available describes this in terms of graduate study broadly rather than confirming current PhD-level eligibility, so check the specific current call for applications, usually issued through the US Embassy Ulaanbaatar's Public Affairs Section, for whether doctoral candidates are eligible in the cycle you're applying to.

The Oyu Tolgoi mining scholarship: real, but its current status is unclear

Oyu Tolgoi, the major copper-gold mine operated under an agreement involving Rio Tinto and the Mongolian government, ran a genuine international scholarship track from 2010 to 2015, funding up to 30 Mongolian nationals for Master's degrees in mining-related fields at Western universities, covering tuition, living costs, airfare, and health insurance, with selection based on merit, leadership potential, and a stated interest in long-term work in Mongolia's mining sector. The more recent Oyu Tolgoi scholarship announcements we could find, covering 2021-2022 cycles, describe a domestic scholarship program funding study inside Mongolia rather than an active overseas track. We could not confirm whether the international component is still running today. If a mining-, geology-, or engineering-adjacent PhD abroad is your goal, this is worth asking Oyu Tolgoi or Erdenes Mongol about directly rather than assuming it's currently open based on older program descriptions still circulating online.

What doesn't apply: Commonwealth Scholarships

Mongolia has never been a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, so the Commonwealth Scholarship and Commonwealth Shared Scholarship schemes, a route we cover for other eligible countries elsewhere on this site, simply don't apply here. This is worth stating plainly, since generic scholarship-aggregator content sometimes lists Commonwealth funding for countries regardless of actual membership, which wastes an applicant's time chasing an ineligible route.

The route that works regardless of which government program applies

Every program above is either Masters-only, scoped to a specific field, or has an unconfirmed current status for PhD applicants. The route that doesn't depend on any of that is the same one that works for applicants from any country: identifying a professor abroad whose lab or research group is actively funded, and securing their agreement to supervise and fund you directly through their own grant or departmental assistantship, the pattern covered across our country and field supervisor-hub guides, including for South Korea and China, two of the more common destinations for Mongolian graduate students given geographic and academic ties.

GradScoutFunding searches for professors by field and country, confirms they're actively publishing, and drafts a personalized first outreach email grounded in their real recent paper for you to review and send yourself, useful groundwork regardless of whether a government scholarship ultimately comes through. 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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