USD 80,000 scholarship — CATS Academy Boston, 2027 entry

CATS Academy Boston is offering Vietnamese students a scholarship worth USD 80,000, awarded across both Grade 11 and Grade 12. It is called the Ivy Continuum Scholarship and is for students entering Grade 11 in January 2027 or September 2027. Applications close 30 November 2026, or earlier if the places are taken.

One thing to be clear about first: this award is not published on the school's website. It is an allocation VNIS Education receives directly from the school, so you will not find it by searching catsacademyboston.com yourself. The conditions are set by the school and can change — ask VNIS for the current wording before building a plan around it.

What USD 80,000 actually covers

The school publishes its 2027-2028 fees at Admissions › Fees. High-school tuition is USD 43,260 for two semesters. Full-time dormitory boarding is USD 35,700 for two semesters, and that figure already includes meals, health insurance, extracurricular activities and sports. On top of that sit a USD 500 registration fee and a USD 2,500 deposit for international students.

So a boarding year runs to roughly USD 79,000. The USD 80,000 is spread over two years — about USD 40,000 a year, which covers rather more than half the tuition, not the whole cost of attendance. That is the number to plan with, rather than the headline 80,000 on its own.

The school itself

The campus is in Braintree, Massachusetts — 2001 Washington St, about 20 km south of downtown Boston. According to the school's own 2025-26 School Profile (CEEB 221541), it has 422 students this year, 388 of them boarding, drawn from 46 nationalities. Average class size is 18.

The grade distribution matters if you are considering Grade 11 entry: 153 students in Grade 11 and 134 in Grade 12 — the two largest grades in the school. Your child will not be joining a handful of students.

The school is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), and is a member of the National Association of Independent Schools, NACAC, NEACAC and the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council. Check the accreditation yourself before anything else: it determines whether the diploma is recognised by U.S. universities.

Academics: eleven AP courses, and one detail worth knowing

The school offers eleven Advanced Placement courses: Biology, Calculus AB, Chemistry, Statistics, Computer Science A, Microeconomics, English Language & Composition, Physics C: Mechanics, United States History, World History and Multi-Variable Calculus. Grade 12 students take at most four AP courses; Grade 11 students at most three.

A detail few people notice but which has real effect on applications: the school does not rank its students and does not weight GPA. A 4.0 at CATS is on the unweighted scale — and wherever an application form asks for class rank, the correct answer is that the school does not rank.

The Ivy Plus Program — 80 hours a year, stated as a number

The school runs an Ivy Plus Program with Foundation Global Education for Grades 9-12. The part for Grades 11 and 12, the Application Module, is quantified: 80 hours per student per year, made up of 12 group workshops and 40 weekly one-to-one sessions. Grades 9-10 get a Planning Module of 50 hours a year.

The hour count is what makes this worth weighing. Plenty of schools say they support college applications; few say how many hours and how many one-to-one sessions. Worth one extra question at interview: are scholarship students automatically enrolled in it, or is that decided separately?

University results — reading the numbers correctly

The school publishes three figures on its Results & Destinations page: over 2,400 university acceptances since 2020, USD 11.7 million in university scholarships over the same period, and acceptances to 85 of the Top 100 universities in the U.S.

All three are cumulative across the whole school over several cohorts — they are not one student's odds. The most recent graduating class, the Class of 2026, included one place at Cornell and one at Brown, along with offers from UC Berkeley, UCLA, NYU, Boston College, Northeastern, Amherst College and the Rhode Island School of Design.

The school's 2021-2025 acceptance list names MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Brown and Yale. But the school pools the whole period and attaches no year to any university, so VNIS repeats no year-by-year sequence of Ivy League admissions — including any such sequence you may see elsewhere. If per-year results matter to your decision, ask the admissions office for results broken down by graduating class.

Mid-year Grade 11 entry, or straight into Grade 12

Both are possible, and the school's own fee schedule is the evidence. It lists a single-semester option starting in September or January — that is what makes mid-year entry work. For Grade 12, the schedule carries a College Counseling Preparation Program of USD 4,725 marked compulsory for Grade 12 transfer students, so the school clearly takes them and runs a dedicated programme for them.

English requirements for international applicants: Grade 11 needs TOEFL 60 or IELTS 5.0; Grade 12 needs TOEFL 65 or IELTS 5.5. Below that, students take the CATS Extra programme first.

Four questions to ask before applying

Is the USD 80,000 split evenly across the two years, and what are the renewal conditions for Grade 12 (minimum GPA, conduct, attendance)?
Can it be combined with other financial aid, or is it the only award?
Are scholarship students automatically enrolled in the Ivy Plus Program?
If you start in January 2027, how is the Grade 11 credit load arranged so the student graduates with the same cohort?

Applying through VNIS

VNIS Education works directly with the CATS Academy Boston admissions office. Leave your details and we will send the current scholarship terms, the fee schedule and interview availability. The award and the admission decision rest with the school; VNIS charges students no fee to apply to a partner school.

The deadline is 30 November 2026, but places are limited and are considered in the order they arrive — applying early is a real advantage rather than a sales line.