Hofstra University

Hofstra sits 25 miles from Manhattan on Long Island and is the largest private university in that region, running 160 undergraduate programmes plus schools of law and medicine and more than 100 dual-degree options. For a Kazakh applicant the notable mechanic is the merit scholarship system: every admitted student is automatically considered, no separate application exists, and Hofstra states plainly that international students are included and that SAT and ACT scores are not required to qualify. The awards are partial but substantial, and the decision arrives with the acceptance packet rather than later. Hofstra also offers an optional four-year locked-in rate that fixes tuition and fees for the whole degree at USD 66,466 a year — protection against the roughly 3-4% annual increases that make a four-year budget hard to forecast from Kazakhstan. Documents can be scanned and emailed rather than posted, and the I-20 application can be filed at any point in the process, even before a decision arrives.