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The first thing you should determine is if you have the financial support to attend a US college from your family. If your family can fund your college tuition, room and board which varies from say $25,000 for a low cost community college to $85,000 for a private university, then you have 100X more options than someone who is relying on financial aid or support from the schools they are applying to. There are over 4300 college in the US that offer a 4 year degree but less than 10 of them are fully need blind and meet 100% of demonstrated need for International students. These few schools are some of the hardest to get into, all have admit rates less than 10% and to qualify typically one has to be a top student with straight As and 99% percentile test scores. Therefore, while there are a sea of applicants in the millions looking for the "full ride" opportunity in the US, the truth is that 99%+ of Int'l applicant will not get a full ride.

What is available across the board at American colleges and universities is "partial" financial aid. And most aid is doled out based on "NEED" versus "MERIT". And some schools use both "need" and "merit" to determine the aid package as well. You will find that some schools that have put aside large sums of aid specifically for Int'l students such as Dartmouth College are some of the most generous institutions. Only recently did they receive $40MM from one of their alumni specifically to assist with this issue. However with a 6.2% acceptance rate and more like 2% acceptance rate for International students, getting admitted is the bigger problem to tackle than how to pay for your education if you wish to attend Dartmouth.

Most colleges will award Int'l student an amount equal to 10% of total costs to 90% with most landing at the 33-50% level. These means that if you are not brilliant, you will still have to figure out a way either through loans from your family or your country banks etc, to come to America to attend university. There is no lack of demand from Int'l students to come to the US for college but lack of financial aid, even from large colleges prevents many Int'l students from having that experience.

So that's the first step. An easy tool on College Vine which is your student profile will help you determine your expected cost for attending some of the most popular options in the US. Collegevine doesn't have 4300 colleges to choose from but there are at least 600+ to choose from. After you fill out the profile, and select some schools, you can see what your chances of getting in are and what the expected cost might be. It's not 100% accurate but certainly better than blind guessing so even if the margin of error is 5%, you will have a really good idea if you will qualify and know what your expected cost is.

I think most students on Blogs are more concerned with getting into schools versus figuring out if they can afford to attend the schools on their list. I think the 2 go hand in hand. You don't want to spend 100-200 hours on college applications applying to the wrong schools.

If you explore CV you will find plenty of other content here specifically for International Students.

Good luck.