That’s not true. The seven schools you listed (Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale) are the only schools that are BOTH need blind for admissions, AND meet full need for all international students.
The student needs to strike Berkeley from their list if they need financial aid as the CA publics dong give need based aid to folks who aren’t CA residents and they give precious little merit aid. So unless they can pay the full $72,000 a year costs, scratch this one.
NYU, Penn, and Cornell are need aware for international students, and this means your level of need will be considered when your application for admission is considered. All three have acceptance rates well below 20%. So getting accepted will be the challenge. It’s sort of unclear from the NYU website whether they meet full need for international students they accept. Penn, and Cornell, I believe, might do so.
Your need for financial aid will need to be considered significantly when applying to colleges here. The reality is…most international students don’t get full rides…they just don’t.
By “semester” are you meaning first YEAR? Did you just complete your first year of high school?