The Boustany Harvard MBA Scholarship: One Award, Every Two Years, and It Is Not Fully Funded
The Boustany Foundation funds an MBA at Harvard Business School, and most pages describing it call it fully funded.
The Foundation’s own page says something else: it covers 75% of tuition fees.
Everything else about this scholarship is unusual too, and worth understanding before you spend an evening on it.
The three numbers that define it
Seventy-five per cent. The Foundation covers three quarters of tuition. You find the remaining quarter, plus living costs in Boston, plus health insurance, plus everything else an MBA costs. For a Harvard MBA that remainder is a substantial amount of money, and nobody should plan around the word “fully funded”.
One. The Foundation awards it to one candidate per cycle.
Every two years. Not annually. The next award goes to the class starting in autumn 2027.
Put those together and the odds are what they are. This is not a scholarship you add to a list of twenty applications; it is one you pursue deliberately, if it genuinely fits you.
What it covers
- 75% of tuition fees at Harvard Business School
- Travel and accommodation for the required internship
- Food during the internship
That is the list. No living allowance in Boston, no insurance, no flights to the United States.
You need the Harvard offer first
This matters more than anything else in the eligibility list.
You must already hold an offer of admission from Harvard Business School before you apply to the Foundation.
So the real work is not the scholarship application. It is the HBS application, GMAT, essays, recommendations, interview, the whole mountain. The Boustany scholarship is something you do afterwards, if you get in.
Anyone who finds this scholarship and treats it as a route into Harvard has the order backwards. Harvard decides first.
Beyond that, the Foundation asks for an excellent academic record and clear potential.
The scholarship accepts all nationalities, with priority given to candidates of Lebanese descent. The Foundation states this plainly, and so do we. If you have Lebanese heritage, your odds here are materially better than almost anywhere else of this caliber. If you do not, you are competing for a single place against a field that includes people who do.
The internship in Monaco
Scholars complete a two-month unpaid internship at the Foundation’s office in Monaco over the summer. The Foundation arranges dates case by case, and covers travel, accommodation and food.
The work involves projects such as raising awareness of the Foundation or designing new scholarship programmes, with the exact scope set on the first day.
Two honest observations.
The word is unpaid. Travel, housing and food come covered, so you are not out of pocket, but you earn nothing for two months in one of the most expensive places in Europe. For an MBA student used to summer internships paying serious money, that is a real opportunity cost to weigh.
And the work is genuinely interesting if philanthropy or foundation management appeals to you. Designing scholarship programmes at a family foundation is a rare thing to have on a CV, and it connects you to people you would not otherwise meet.
Whether that trade works depends entirely on what you want your career to be.
How to apply, and when
Send to admissions@boustany-foundation.org, or use the Foundation’s own application form:
- A CV with a photograph
- Your GMAT scores
- Your Harvard acceptance letter
Shortlisted candidates face one or more interviews.
The deadline for the next cycle is 31 May 2027, with the award made in June 2027.
That gives you something most scholarship posts cannot offer: a long runway. If Harvard is genuinely your plan, you have more than a year to build the HBS application that this scholarship depends on.
What about Cambridge?
The Foundation has historically run a University of Cambridge MBA scholarship on the same pattern, one award, once every two years, priority to candidates of Lebanese descent, with a summer internship at the Foundation.
We could not verify its current value or deadline from a recent official source, and the figures circulating online come from old pages. So we are not printing numbers for it.
If Cambridge interests you more than Harvard, write to the Foundation at the same address and ask about the current Cambridge cycle. One email settles it.
Who should actually apply
Let us be direct, because a scholarship with one award every two years deserves honesty rather than encouragement.
Apply if you are already building a serious Harvard Business School application for autumn 2027, you can fund roughly a quarter of tuition and all of your living costs, you have Lebanese heritage or an exceptional record, and a summer in foundation work appeals to you more than a paid internship.
Do not apply if you are hoping this scholarship will get you into Harvard, if the remaining 25% plus living costs is beyond your family, or if you need a scholarship this year rather than for autumn 2027.
Neither answer is a judgement about you. They are just different situations, and knowing which one you are in saves a great deal of time.
If this is not you
Most readers of this page want a funded postgraduate degree, not specifically a Harvard MBA.
For fully funded master’s study, the Chinese Government Scholarship and Türkiye Bursları cover tuition and living costs rather than a percentage. For a funded year at a world-ranked university, Schwarzman Scholars covers everything at Tsinghua, and the Yenching Academy runs two years at Peking University.
And if your goal is research rather than business, European doctorates pay a salary with no tuition fee at all our ORFeus guide and DTU Denmark post explain how.
One habit carries across all of them, and this scholarship illustrates it perfectly: read what the funder actually pays, not what a headline calls it. Seventy-five per cent and one hundred per cent are different lives.