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Mohamad Bassel Khair, right, kisses his 2-year-old son Sami Khair. Khair, of Damascus, Syria, is graduating from Montclair State University with a master’s degree in nutrition and food science. Before applying to the New Jersey school in 2015, he and his wife had fled Syria to Egypt, where they couldn't legally work. Image Credit: AP


Boston: More colleges in the US are offering scholarships to Syrian refugees.

At least a dozen schools have pledged to cover full or partial tuition for some Syrians over the past year, including the University of Southern California and Davidson College in North Carolina.

They join a coalition of 60 colleges that have offered financial aid to Syrian students since the country’s civil war erupted in 2011.

In many cases, colleges have created scholarships under pressure from their students. But some schools say that reserving financial aid for students of a certain nationality breaks federal law.

Universities have awarded scholarships to more than 150 Syrian students, but there are still relatively few in the US. While 800 Syrians studied in the US in 2015, there were almost 60,000 from Saudi Arabia.