The DAAD New York office serves residents of the United States and Canada who are enrolled or employed at American and Canadian higher education institutions and would like to study or pursue research in Germany.

Every year Students are selected on merit basis and offered a DAAD scholarship to study postgraduate degree masters and PhD in German universities.

[3] For example, Günter Blobel (1999),[13] Gao Xingjian (2000),[14] Wolfgang Ketterle (2001),[15] Imre Kertész (2002), Wangari Maathai (2004),[16] Herta Müller (2009),[17] Mario Vargas Llosa (2009), Svetlana Alexievich (2015), Leo Hoffmann-Axthelm (2017),[18] Olga Tokarczuk (2018), Peter Handke (2019)[19] and others.

[6] During the fall of 2014, the DAAD, supported by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, launched a program called the Leadership for Syria.

[20] In the initial stage of the program, 271 Syrians seen as suitable for university scholarships were chosen from potential candidates who were "either still living in Syria or in one of the bordering countries (Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey), or who had fled to Germany".