An International Student’s Guide to U.S. Scholarships
By SCHOLARSHIP AMERICA
March 22, 2012
The idea of the “American Dream” means many things to many people, but one of its most common—and important—elements is the ability to further one’s self by getting a college education. And for students born outside the United States, scholarships can be an invaluable help toward achieving that dream. Whether you’re a new immigrant, a student going on to graduate school, or a learner returning to college, there’s international scholarship assistance out there for your studies in the United States.

Before you do any scholarship searching, it’s important to know that you should never have to pay to find or apply for scholarships. If a scholarship search engine or application asks you for a credit card or other financial information before you can use it, stay away. Reputable scholarships never charge to apply, and there are plenty of excellent free search engines. (Scholarship Experts, in particular, features a search specific to international students.)

[Learn more about studying in the United States.]

One of your best sources of financial aid will be the college you attend. If you were born outside the United States but are now a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, start by looking at colleges within the state where you live. Generally speaking, state residents pay a much lower tuition rate than out-of-state residents.

For example, a year of tuition and fees at the University of Virginia costs around $12,000 for students who live in Virginia, and around $36,000 for those who don’t. Establishing residency in a state can instantly cut a great deal off of your ultimate college price tag.

If you don’t live in the United States, you can do some very thorough research on colleges and financial aid opportunities at EducationUSA. This service of the U.S. Department of State and the Institute of International Education provides a ton of online information; there is also a frequently updated list of financial aid opportunities and, most usefully, a guide to advising centers in countries around the world, where you can meet face-to-face with experts in your country that can help you search schools, translate information, and learn about your options.

You should also take a look at ForeignBorn.com for useful information on applying to schools, obtaining a student visa, and more.

[See which colleges offer international students the most financial aid.]

No matter where you live, or decide to go to school, your college’s financial aid office (and its website) should be your next stop. Most colleges have scholarship programs specifically for international students attending their institutions. To use just one example, the University of Oregon awards more than $1 million each year to students born outside the United States.

You’ll notice on that page that some of this funding is for students from specific countries, some is open to students worldwide, and some requires that you study a certain field or do specific customer service—it can be confusing, but college admissions officers and financial aid experts are there to help you find as much money as you qualify for.

These resources will go a long way in helping with your education in the United States, no matter where you’re from; you can also seek out opportunities specific to your country or even your gender. If you’re a native of a Latin American or Caribbean nation, check out the listing of scholarships provided by the Organization of American States’s Leo. S. Rowe Pan American Fund. The fund exists to provide interest-free student loans to students, and this brochure also features a useful listing of scholarship opportunities (starting on page 5), sorted by your country of residence.

If you live in one of the 17 countries (across four continents) where the Aga Khan Foundation has a presence, and you’re doing graduate or postgraduate work, don’t miss out on the Foundation’s International Scholarship Programme, though note that awards made through this program are 50 percent scholarship and 50 percent loan, so you will have to pay part of the award back over time.

[See more ways to find scholarships for international students.]

And, finally, if you’re a female graduate student and a non-U.S. resident, the venerable AAUW International Fellowship provides a tremendous opportunity; in 2011, the fellowship program awarded nearly $1 million to women dedicated to improving life in their home countries. This highly competitive program usually opens in August for the next academic year, so keep it in mind if you’re an exemplary grad or postgrad student.

Matt Konrad has been with Scholarship America since 2005. He is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota and a former scholarship recipient.

Source: http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/the-scholarship-coach/2012/03/22/an-international-students-guide-to-us-scholarships

Article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on increased test security for the ACT and SAT tests.

ACT and College Board Tighten Test Security
By Eric Hoover

High-school students will soon have to upload photos of themselves when they register for ACT and SAT exams. The image will be printed on each test taker’s admissions ticket, which will then be checked against the photo IDs they present at testing centers.

The new policy is just one of several “test security” enhancements that ACT Inc. and the College Board announced on Tuesday. The changes arose from last year’s cheating scandal in Nassau County, N.Y., where more than 50 students were found to have either impersonated someone else and taken the ACT or SAT for that person, or paid another student to take the test for them. An investigation of the cheating led by Nassau County’s district attorney, Kathleen M. Rice, led to the arrest of 20 teenagers.

“These reforms close a gaping hole in standardized-test security that allowed students to cheat and steal admissions offers and scholarship money from kids who played by the rules,” Ms. Rice said in a written statement announcing the new policies on Tuesday.

Among other changes, students’ uploaded photos will reside on a database available to college admissions officers and high-school officials. All students will also be required to identify their high school when they register, so as to ensure that high-school administrators receive students’ scores along with their uploaded photos. Before taking the exams, test takers will be asked to “certify their identity” in writing, and they will be told that impersonating another student could result in criminal prosecution.

Robert A. Schaeffer, public-education director at FairTest, a testing watchdog group, believes the new procedures will make impersonating another student much more difficult, if not impossible. “Using a digitized photo closes the barn door,” he said, “now that the horse has left the barn.”

Yet Mr. Schaeffer also noted that impersonation is but one form of cheating. And it’s apparently not the most common way in which students cheat on standardized tests.

Last October, officials at the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, testified at a state Senate hearing in New York that about 3,000 test scores—out of some two million exams taken—were canceled each year, either because of irregularities reported by test-center supervisors, or because of large score jumps from previous tests, according to The New York Times. Yet impersonations accounted for only about 150 of those cases, according to an ETS official quoted in the article.

Most cheating, Mr. Schaeffer said, involves collaboration among test takers during the exam, or the age-old phenomenon of roaming eyeballs. In other words, it’s surely a lot easier to standardize an exam and tighten test-registration procedures than it is to control what happens once students pick up their pencils.

Source: http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/act-college-board-tighten-test-security/29811?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

Source:  Korean Herald (http://www.koreaherald.com/pop/NewsPrint.jsp?newsMLId=20120305001054)

The Ministry of Health and Welfare said Monday that it planned to open two graduate schools dedicated to the pharmaceuticals industry in September.

The government has started looking for universities interested in hosting the schools, one in Seoul or its outskirts and another elsewhere in the country.

The ministry plans to open the schools in September in time for the start of the second semester of the year. The Korea Health Industry Development Institute will hold a briefing for the interested universities at the Seoul Foundation of Women and Family building in Seoul on Friday.

The names of the two universities selected to host the pharmaceutical graduate schools will be announced on March 15.

According to the ministry, the main objective of the graduate schools will be providing all-around knowledge of the medical, management and legal fields related to the pharmaceutical industry. Major courses will include topics such as state authorization processes for drugs, economic and business feasibility assessments, as well as management of technology related to making and distributing pharmaceuticals.

The authorities also seek to link pharmaceutical manufacturers to the graduate schools to collaborate on curriculum development and employment.

Companies will suggest required subjects to be reflected in the curriculum, and offer internships or on-the-job training opportunities to students. A possible consortium of companies and schools is expected to boost the development of new drugs and promote employment in the sector, officials said.

The establishment of pharmaceutical graduate schools is part of a government measure to develop the domestic pharmaceutical industry to be implemented from March 30. Government officials regard it as essential to foster local pharmaceutical experts in order to develop new drugs and penetrate foreign markets.

“For example, Sungkyunkwan University and Samsung Electronics have jointly founded the ‘mobile phone department’ at the school, where students learn from alpha to omega about the mobile phone industry and get a job at the company after graduation. This will bring a win-win effect to both sides,” a ministry official said.

By Bae Ji-sook (baejisook@heraldm.com)

This article from Education Week was written by former Minister of Education, Science, and Technology and Fulbright alumnus Byung-man Ahn, and talks about some of the issues in Korean education and the efforts to find solutions for them.

Education in the Republic of Korea

National treasure or national headache?

During the more than two years I served as South Korea’s minister of education, science, and technology, I found myself frequently astonished by the outside world’s lavish praise for our education system. President Barack Obama has often noted in speeches the enthusiasm of Korean parents for their children’s education, the high quality of Korean teachers, the number of learning hours that Korean students spend, and the outstanding educational achievements these have produced; for example, top rankings in international academic-achievement tests, and low rates of school dropouts and juvenile delinquency. As reported, in particular, Korean students ranked first in reading, first in math, and third in science in the Program for International Student Assessment among the 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that participated.

While many may look with envy at these achievements, I could not conceal my bewilderment at the fact that, within Korea, that same education system has been called the nation’s biggest problem.

The criticism has much to do with students’ quest to attend prestigious colleges and universities. The most important factor in student selection has been the College Scholastic Ability Test (Korea’s equivalent of the sat). After that come high school grades, and if a determination cannot be made on that basis, the university administers an essay-based exam or something similar and selects the students with the highest scores.

The process has led aspiring entrants and their parents to devote themselves to a style of examination preparation centered around memorization. Parents also believe that they cannot rely on public education alone to get their children into the desired colleges, leading to an enormous dependence on private education.

While Korea’s students excel at learning, they believe its purpose lies not in self-development based on personal interest or motivation, but in entrance into a highly ranked university. Students have no time to ponder the fundamental question of “What do I need to learn, and why?” They simply need to prepare for the test by learning the most-effective methods for digesting tremendous quantities of material and committing more to memory than others do.

Based on all this, the current administration of President Lee Myung-bak has focused its policy efforts on creating the type of education in which creativity is emphasized over rote learning, diversity over uniformity, and self-determined education over other-determined education.

In an effort to promote creativity, the administration has worked over the past two years to reduce the amount of material students are required to study and to reorganize educational programs so students are able to lead more-varied academic lives.

To ensure diversity in education, the administration has created “garden schools” and boarding-style high schools in agricultural communities. These are designed to encourage rural students to stay in their communities instead of moving to urban areas for educational opportunities. The president’s administration has also created a range of schools at the high school level that allow students to gain employment immediately upon graduation and enter into university later. The administration has promised to increase the number of these types of schools in the future.

Third, the government has committed to developing policies to strengthen public education to reduce Koreans’ dependency on private education. It has developed more-stringent assessments of student achievement and teacher competency. For schools that ranked low in these assessments, the Lee administration has added “honor teachers,” expanded mentoring programs for students, and provided financial support for the purchase of new educational equipment.

Finally, but most crucially, the government has instituted a college-entrance-officer system so that postsecondary admissions depend not just on the rote-learning-centered entrance exams, but also consider factors such as individual students’ talents, creativity, and growth potential. The government is working to enable this system to take root in the university community at a graduated but nonetheless rapid rate, and the University Presidents’ Association of Korea is encouraging colleges and universities to adopt this system voluntarily. I was committed to ensuring the implementation of this system from the first year of my ministerial term, and I am happy to say that it has been gaining momentum in recent years.

Our government recognizes teachers as our most valuable human resource and has dedicated massive funding to their professional development. To this end, we have opened residential teacher-training centers in school districts across Korea, where teachers can work on improving their English proficiency and refining their pedagogical skills to incorporate tasks that foster creativity and innovation among students. In addition, the government rewards teachers for pursuing graduate degrees and offers opportunities for teachers to take fully funded sabbaticals to study abroad.

These examples represent but a small portion of the educational reforms currently under way in South Korea. The common thread that runs through all of these reforms is the goal of developing an education system that values both creativity and the acquisition of necessary knowledge and skills. Between the pain of memorizing and the pleasure of creative expression, there needs to be a balance, both to develop the full potential of our students and to meet the nation’s need for a skilled workforce and a well-educated citizenry. The success of these reforms hinges, of course, on how seriously these issues are considered, how carefully educators craft their policies and practices, and how genuinely they are perceived by those directly involved in education.

This essay was adapted from a speech Byong-man Ahn gave at the Harry S. Truman Conference at the University of Missouri, in Columbia, in August 2011.

만일 당신이 상위 MBA 학교에 대기 상태에 있다면, 좀 더 경쟁력있는 지원이 되도록 적극적으로 나서야 합니다. 어떻게 해야하는지 다음의 조언들을 참고하세요!

자세한 사항: http://tinyurl.com/6snwn3y

입학 지원 에세이는 지원자가 입학 사정관들에게 자신에 대해 알릴 수 있는 기회입니다. 미국 상위 인문과학대학 중 하나인 Pomona College의 부총장이며 입학과 재정 담당자가 제시한 조언을 잘 활용해 보세요!

자세한 사항: http://tinyurl.com/7palvmg

미국에서의 MBA를 고려하고 계신가요?  UC 버클리 MBA 지원자의 성공적인 인터뷰를 보시고, 미국 상위 10위권 학교에 지원한 우수한 지원자에 대해 배워보세요!

자세한 사항: http://tinyurl.com/7xf3yph

By Lee Woo-young

The government has set aside more funds for state scholarships to ease the heavy college tuition burden, allowing college students to receive loans without having to repay them before finding employment, the Education Ministry said Monday.

Increased tuition subsidies will be offered to college students through the 2012 national budget as the government added 250 billion won ($216 million) to the previous 1.5 trillion won, the ministry said.

The extra subsidies are expected to decrease nominal college tuition by 25 percent, 3 percent higher than the previous estimate when the fund amounted to 1.5 trillion won. The subsidies will be given to the bottom 70 percent income bracket, whose annual income is under 51 million won, officials said.

About 760,000 students, about 57 percent of the total, are estimated to be eligible to benefit from the subsidies.

Another 823 billion won will be spent to lower the interest rate of the national student loan by 1 percentage point to 3.9 percent and lower the minimum grade for the loan from B to C.

The government linked increased subsidies to universities’ efforts to decrease their tuition fees as well as to provide students with more scholarships. Depending on their efforts, the government will determine the amount of tuition subsidies they will receive.

About 1.7 million college students, 78 percent of the total in Korea, have applied for the state scholarship since December.

Source: http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20120102000769

Becoming a teacher or a civil servant is the most favored career path for South Korean high school students and their parents, a survey showed Tuesday, reflecting their desire for job security.

In a survey of 2,165 high school students across the country conducted by the education ministry, 11 percent selected teaching as their preferred future job, followed by civil service at 4.2 percent and the police force at 4.1 percent.

Explaining why they chose their future career paths, the respondents said they were influenced by their parents the most, followed by media, teachers and peers, while key factors also included their aptitude and talent, the survey showed.

In the same survey of 1,876 parents, 17.8 percent, the largest segment, preferred a government job for their children, with the next largest group of 16.9 percent wanting their offspring to become teachers. Becoming a doctor ranked third at 6.8 percent, while 4.4 percent said they would put their children’s preference first.

“As unemployment has become a nagging social problem, not only a growing number of job seekers but also high school students are looking to the public sector. It is deemed to guarantee greater job security,” said Kim Na-rah, an official at the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training.

The country’s jobless rate reached 2.9 percent in November last year, but unemployment among those aged 15 to 29 for the same month was 6.8 percent, government data showed.

Source: http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20120110000358

미국 대학의 외국학생을 위한 재정 지원 체계는 매우 복잡합니다. U.S. News and World Report 기사에 따르면,장래의 외국학생들은 전문가에게서 다양한 재정지원에 관한 조언을 구할 것을 제시합니다. 이것은 학생들이 최고의 재정지원에 관한 검색을 할 수 있게 해 줄 것입니다.

자세한 사항: http://tinyurl.com/89z4akv