University of Houston–Clear Lake Scholarships (2026–2027)

📅 2027–2028 Planning Note: The costs below reflect the most recently published figures (2026–2027). Universities typically finalize the next year’s rates in the spring, and we’ll update this page once official 2027–2028 numbers are released.

Planning tip: At large public universities, tuition, fees, and housing usually increase modestly each year (often in the 2–5% range). For early budgeting, families may want to plan for roughly $1,000–$1,500 more in-state or $2,000–$3,000 more out-of-state in total direct costs once new rates are published.

Average Federal Net Price: $15,563 — this is what families actually paid after grants and scholarships (no loans), based on the most recent federal data. Your specific cost could be significantly lower or higher depending on your financial aid eligibility and merit scholarships. New to Net Price & SAI? Read our guide.

📌 Regional Tuition & Waiver Options

UHCL charges by the credit hour. There is no flat-rate band where credits 12 through 18 cost the same, which is how most large publics work. The figures above assume 30 credit hours across the year, or 15 per semester. If your student takes 12 hours a term instead of 15, the tuition line drops, but so does eligibility for most of the scholarships on this page, since nearly all of them require 12 hours at census and 12 hours successfully completed.

⚠️ Read This Before You Scroll

UH-Clear Lake does not offer an automatic academic scholarship to incoming freshmen. There is no chart where a 3.5 GPA and a 26 ACT guarantee a set dollar amount. If your student is a high school senior, the two awards below are the only things on this page that arrive without a scholarship application, and one of them is transfer-only.

Parent translation: at UHCL, the scholarship work happens in the competitive section. Do not treat admission as the finish line.

💵 The $1,000 Almost Nobody Claims

The 3-Step Orientation Scholarships pay in three chunks: $250 for finishing the Orientation Launchpad modules and submitting the FAFSA, $500 for attending Admitted Student Day plus clearing account holds, meeting an advisor and enrolling at least half time, and $250 for finishing pre-orientation modules and attending a June orientation session.

Every one of those is something your student has to do regardless. The only reason families miss the money is that each step has its own deadline, and they run from late April through June. Put all three on the calendar the day the acceptance letter arrives. International students are not eligible for these awards.

🔑 The Out-of-State Play: One Award, $16,500 in Savings

If your student is not a Texas resident, this is the single most important paragraph on the page. Under Texas Education Code rules, a non-resident or international student who receives a competitive, merit-based institutional scholarship worth $1,000 or more in an academic year becomes eligible to pay Texas resident tuition for that year.

At UHCL, non-resident tuition and fees run about $25,828. Resident tuition and fees run $9,298. So a $2,000 Hawk Scholars Scholarship is not really worth $2,000. It is worth roughly $18,500 once the waiver attaches.

• The waiver attaches to a single qualifying award. Two $600 scholarships do not add up to the threshold.
• It is re-evaluated every academic year, so the qualifying award has to keep coming.
• No separate waiver application exists. If you qualify, the financial aid office handles it.
• Two UHCL awards carry the resident-tuition benefit written right into them: Hawk Scholars for non-resident and international students, and the Agarwal MIS Endowment for graduate MIS students.

❓ Flagship / Competitive Scholarship FAQs

What are the real New Hawk deadlines?
Priority is February 1 and final is April 1. That gap is not a grace period. Priority applicants are notified in March and get first claim on the funding. April 1 applicants are notified in June and only receive whatever is left. Applications for the next cycle open July 1 of the prior year, so the window is genuinely long. There is no reason to be late.

Can my out-of-state student win the New Hawk Scholarship?
No. New Hawk requires Texas residency and graduation from high school in the matching academic year. This trips up a lot of families who see “full ride” and start planning. If you are out of state, your path is Hawk Scholars plus the Competitive Scholarship Waiver.

How does a student qualify for New Hawk?
Any one of three triggers: top 15 percent of the graduating class, an ACT of 24, or an SAT of 1170 (1100 on the old SAT). Then a 700-word essay on your most meaningful achievements and how they connect to your goals, plus a separate document listing leadership activities. Have both files completely finished before opening the application, because you cannot go back and add documents after submitting.

What does it take to keep New Hawk for four years?
A 3.0 cumulative UHCL GPA, enrollment in at least 12 credit hours at census each semester, and successful completion of those 12 hours. UHCL states the commitment is four years, reviewed each semester.

Should we apply for both New Hawk and President’s Excellence?
Yes. They have different deadlines (President’s Excellence priority is January 15, New Hawk is February 1) and different requirements. President’s Excellence needs a 3.5 GPA and a recommendation letter rather than an essay. UHCL will typically award the stronger package rather than both, but you cannot be offered something you did not apply for.

Is the Cullen Leadership Scholarship worth the effort for a transfer?
If your student is finishing an associate degree at a Houston or Galveston area community college with a 3.5 or better, yes. It is $2,000 a year with one renewal year available, so $4,000 total, and the pool is limited to recent associate graduates from a specific set of nearby colleges. That is a small crowd. It requires a two-page autobiographical statement covering achievements, leadership and career goals.

My student is graduating from UHCL and staying for a master’s. Anything for us?
The Higher-Up Scholarship, $1,000 paid as $500 in fall and $500 in spring, is built specifically as a thank-you for UHCL undergraduate alumni entering a UHCL graduate program. It does not renew. The priority deadline is July 1 with a final on August 1, and funding is finite, so July matters.

Does UHCL participate in National Merit?
UHCL publishes no National Merit scholarship program. If your student is a Finalist and seriously considering UHCL, call the Office of Student Financial Aid directly rather than relying on third-party scholarship databases, several of which list packages UHCL does not document.

Is UHCL a Stamps or QuestBridge partner?
No to both.

🧠 Parent Strategy: The February Window

Most of UHCL’s departmental and donor scholarships open for applications during the month of February for the following fall, and they all run through the same E-Services portal. This is the highest-return hour your student will spend all year.

1. Log into E-Services, click Admissions, then “Apply for UHCL Scholarships.”
2. Click Search with no filters. Read every result that appears.
3. Open Details before clicking Apply. Once you submit, that scholarship is locked and you cannot attach anything else.
4. Self-identify honestly on every prompt, especially first-generation status. That single checkbox opens a cluster of donor-funded awards.
5. Screenshot each confirmation.

One warning straight from UHCL: applying for scholarships your student clearly does not qualify for may disqualify them from all scholarship opportunities. Read the criteria first.

UHCL has announced that beginning with the Fall 2027 application cycle, Hawk Promise expands to Texas families with adjusted gross incomes up to $100,000, raised from the previous $65,000 ceiling. For qualifying students it covers tuition and mandatory fees through grant aid for up to four years.

Be aware of a live inconsistency: as of this writing, UHCL’s own grants page still lists the $65,000 figure against the 2026-2027 admit year. The announcement and the aid page disagree. If your family income falls between $65,000 and $100,000, do not rule yourself out based on the website. Call the Office of Student Financial Aid at 281-283-2480 and ask directly.

Hawk Promise covers tuition and fees only. Housing, meals and books are still your responsibility, and it is not available for summer terms.

❓ Hidden Gems FAQ

Do I have to apply for Hawk Promise?
No. There is no separate application. Eligibility is determined once your student has been admitted and has a FAFSA on file listing UHCL. What you do have to do is submit the FAFSA or TASFA and every requested supporting document by January 15. UHCL is explicit that students who miss that date forfeit Hawk Promise. Renewal requires a 2.5 cumulative GPA and full-time enrollment.

What is the difference between Hawk Promise and Hawk Advantage?
Hawk Promise is a guarantee that grant aid will cover your tuition and fees if you qualify, and it requires no application. Hawk Advantage is a competitive need-based scholarship worth up to $2,500 a year, up to $10,000 over four years, and it does require an application through E-Services with an August 1 deadline. Both require Texas residency and a January 15 FAFSA or TASFA. Apply for Hawk Advantage even if you expect Hawk Promise, because not everyone eligible for Hawk Advantage receives it.

My student wants to live on campus. Is the housing scholarship worth applying for?
Yes, but understand what it is. The Hawk Housing Scholarship is $1,000 applied to one semester of a standard double room in Hunter Hall. It does not renew automatically, though students can reapply each fall and spring. It requires two separate steps: a Hunter Hall housing application through StarRez, then the scholarship application through E-Services. Priority goes to students who show financial need and live far from campus. Priority deadline is June 1, final is in early August.

We are first-generation. Is there a scholarship for that?
Not a single named one, which is exactly why families miss it. UHCL runs several donor-funded awards that give preference to first-generation students, and the way you reach them is by filing the general scholarship application and checking the first-gen box when prompted. First-gen here means neither parent or legal guardian completed a four-year bachelor’s degree. Nearly half of UHCL’s undergraduates are first-generation, so this is a mainstream path, not a niche one.

My student already studied abroad. Is it too late to get money for it?
No, and this is one of the most overlooked awards on the list. The Kathryn F. Dickerson International Programs Scholarship is for students who have already participated in or are currently in a study abroad or exchange program, and the award applies to the following semester. It works more like reimbursement than up-front funding. One to two page essay, non-renewable, but you can apply again each year you qualify.

What about nursing at the Pearland campus?
Two awards, the Ann Wilke Memorial Nursing Scholarship and the Vivian L. Smith Scholarship, are restricted to the RN-BSN program at UHCL at Pearland with a minimum of 6 credit hours. Both ask for the same one to two page essay, so apply for both in the same sitting. The applicant pool is tiny. UHCL does not publish amounts for either, and both pages carry stale aid-year references, so confirm the current cycle with the financial aid office before budgeting around them.

Are ROTC scholarships realistic at UHCL?
Yes, through cross-enrollment. UHCL students participate in Army ROTC and Air Force ROTC Detachment 003 at the University of Houston. National ROTC scholarships can cover tuition and fees plus a books stipend and a living allowance, and applications run roughly December through April. There is a post-graduation service obligation, so treat this as a career decision rather than a financial one.

Is the Agarwal MIS award only for graduate students?
Yes, Management Information Systems graduate students in the College of Business. Priority goes to incoming first-time MIS graduate students. It is $1,000 a year, but for a non-resident or international student the resident tuition rate that comes with it is worth many times that. If your student is heading into MIS at UHCL from out of state, this is one of the highest-leverage applications available to them.

UH-Clear Lake does not operate an honors college or a university honors program. There is no separate honors application, no honors curriculum, no honors housing, and no honors scholarship pool. If you have seen a third-party college site claim otherwise, it is wrong. UHCL’s own academic structure lists four colleges and no honors unit.

If your student wants a challenge and close faculty contact, the honest answer at UHCL is not a program, it is a department. Class sizes are already small, the student-to-faculty ratio runs about 19 to 1, and undergraduate research is genuinely accessible because there are relatively few graduate students competing for lab slots in most fields.

• Aerospace and Engineering: Senior design projects run across two semesters and are evaluated by an industry advisory board, with NASA JSC and Houston Spaceport partners within a few miles.
• Computer Science: Faculty hold National Science Foundation grants and run labs that take undergraduates.
• Psychology and Behavioral Sciences: Graduate-track research supervision is available to strong undergraduates, and several scholarship lines specifically ask for a faculty-supervised research project.
• Business: The MBA with a Commercialization of Space certificate is one of the few programs of its kind anywhere, and undergraduates in Culverhouse-style pipelines can position early for it.

Parent translation: at UHCL, the way your student gets the honors experience is by walking into a professor’s office hours in their first semester and asking what they are working on. There is no application for that.

For most of its history UHCL was an upper-level institution serving juniors, seniors and graduate students. It only began admitting freshmen relatively recently, and it still awards more graduate degrees than undergraduate ones. That means small classes and a lot of working adults on campus, but also fewer of the traditional trappings. There is no big-time athletics program and limited on-campus housing. Families who want a conventional four-year residential experience should visit before committing. Families who want an affordable, career-connected degree with real access to faculty and to Houston employers tend to be very happy here.

Federal law requires every college to publish a net price calculator, and UHCL links to theirs from the Costs and Aid page and the left-hand menu. As of this writing, that link returns a Page Not Found error, and we could not locate a working replacement anywhere on their site. We have reported it.

In the meantime, here is what UHCL students at each income level actually paid after grants and scholarships, straight from federal College Scorecard data. This is the same information a calculator would estimate, based on what real families were charged rather than a projection.

Two caveats. These figures cover students who received federal aid, so families who filed no FAFSA are not represented. And they blend residents with non-residents, which is why the higher brackets look steep. A Texas resident at $110,000 with no aid is looking at roughly $21,900 in direct costs, which is close to the published in-state total.

Notice the jump between the $30,001 to $48,000 bracket and the $48,001 to $75,000 bracket. That is roughly where Pell and TEXAS Grant eligibility starts thinning out. It is also exactly the range the expanded Hawk Promise is designed to catch starting with the Fall 2027 cycle.

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