PhD and Masters Funding for Saudi Students Abroad: The King Abdullah Scholarship Program Explained (2026)

Our own guide to funded PhD study inside Saudi Arabia flags, almost in passing, that the King Abdullah Scholarship Program (KASP) is a different, much larger programme that sends Saudi nationals abroad rather than bringing international students in. This post is the other half of that story, and it's worth telling carefully, because a large share of what's currently indexed about KASP online is years out of date, written before a major 2016 eligibility tightening that changed the programme substantially.

What the programme is, and what it's called now

Launched in 2005 under King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the scholarship sponsors academically strong Saudi citizens to study at foreign universities, in degree fields selected to match the Saudi labour market's own needs, across Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD levels. At its peak in the mid-2010s the programme had sent well over 100,000 students abroad, with Saudi enrollment at US institutions alone reaching nearly 60,000 in the 2014-15 academic year. "King Abdullah Scholarship Program" is still the name most commonly used for it, though the Ministry of Education's current external scholarship portal (studyinsaudi.moe.gov.sa) also refers to it as the King's External Scholarship Program in places, the underlying programme is the same state-funded outbound scholarship, the branding has simply shifted over nearly two decades.

The 2016 tightening most guides online don't mention

This is the genuine gap in a lot of what currently ranks for this topic. In 2016, facing a 12% cut to the education budget, Saudi Arabia restricted KASP eligibility to students admitted into one of the world's top 50 academic programmes in their specific field, or a university ranked among the global top 100, measured against rankings the Ministry itself designates (Shanghai, QS, and US News among them), alongside new caps limiting funded pre-academic language training to six months. The practical effect was substantial: total Saudi students studying abroad under the programme declined meaningfully from the mid-2010s peak. A page that describes KASP as open to "any accredited university" without mentioning a ranking requirement at all is almost certainly describing the pre-2016 version of the programme, not the one currently in effect.

Eligibility and what's actually funded today

The current external scholarship programme is open to Saudi citizens applying for Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD study at an eligible foreign university, generally requiring a strong GPA (around 3.0/4.0 or higher is commonly cited as a baseline) and admission into a programme that clears the Ministry's own ranking bar for that specific field. STEM, medicine, engineering, and business fields are generally prioritized in line with national labour-market planning, though the programme spans other disciplines too where a qualifying programme and ranking exist. Funding, where granted, covers tuition, a living stipend, health insurance, and return flights. Applications run through the Ministry's official portal rather than through the destination university or a general scholarship aggregator site, and recent cycles have used a defined annual window (for example, postgraduate applications running from May through September in one recent cycle); confirm the current year's exact dates and partner-university list directly on the Ministry's own site before planning around a date quoted elsewhere.

Which universities actually qualify

The Ministry maintains its own list of eligible partner universities and, separately, its own designated rankings of qualifying programmes by field, commonly cited at around 70 partner institutions across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and other destinations. This list is the Ministry's own, not a copy of a general global ranking you might check independently, and it's revised, so a specific university's eligibility (or a specific programme's eligibility within an otherwise-eligible university) needs to be confirmed on the current portal rather than assumed from an older list or a general prestige ranking.

The admission-first sequence

As with most national scholarships that fund study at a foreign university rather than placing you in one, KASP generally requires you to have already secured admission into an eligible programme before the scholarship funds it. For a PhD applicant specifically, that means the work of identifying a supervisor whose research fits yours, and getting that admission secured, is the step that actually needs to happen first, well before the scholarship application itself. Treating KASP as something to apply for before you've lined up admission gets the sequence backwards.

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