St. John's University

St. John's is a Vincentian Catholic university with its main campus in Queens, a Manhattan site and locations in Rome, Paris and Limerick. Two things make it unusually navigable for a Kazakh applicant. There is no application fee at all for online submissions, and it publishes three explicit admission pathways with the exact English score band for each — Direct Admission at TOEFL 80, the ELITE programme at 61-79 where credit-bearing ESL courses count toward elective or foreign-language requirements rather than being dead time, and Conditional Admission down to TOEFL 33 through a non-credit English Language Institute. An applicant can therefore see in advance which door they are entering. Set against that, St. John's states flatly that it has no financial aid for international students; only merit scholarships are available. Essays and recommendation letters are encouraged but not required except for Pharmacy, which requires both. 645 international students from 119 countries are enrolled across all levels.