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NEWSLETTER

Access and Equity in Higher Education: Reflections on a Decade of Social Justice Fellowships

 

 

“IFP represented new thinking about the way in which international aid could be used to help vulnerable groups reach their educational and leadership goals while giving back to their societies.”
Chinua Achebe, Nigerian author
 
On May 23rd, staff, alumni, board members and guests of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program (IFP) gathered at the Foundation’s New York headquarters to celebrate a decade-long, groundbreaking program that transformed a traditional fellowship mechanism into a global network linking higher education and social change. 
 
Attended by nearly 200 guests, including IFP directors from the program’s twenty-two offices worldwide, alumni, current fellows, university representatives, the Board of the International Fellowships Fund (IFP’s managing organization) and many Foundation officers and staff – the event highlighted the achievements of the Foundation’s largest ever program in international education.
 
Launched in 2001, IFP provided higher education opportunities for social justice leaders from marginalized communities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia. The program supported over 4,300 exceptional individuals, virtually all of whom work for social justice in their home communities.
 
Having successfully fulfilled the program’s twin goals of broadening access to higher education and building leadership for social justice, IFP is scheduled to close operations in September 2013. 
 
Below is a brief synthesis of the program that builds on excerpts from a new book, Linking Higher Education to Social Change, by Joan Dassin, Mary Zurbuchen and Rachel Clift. The book was launched at the May 23rd IFP Celebration, and offers an inside glimpse at how the program was conceived and executed as well as insights into lessons learned over the past decade. 
 
Who We Are
 
Supported initially through a $280 million grant made by the Ford Foundation to the International Fellowships Fund (IFF) in 2001, IFP removed traditional barriers to advanced higher education in a number of ways. To start, we eliminated restrictions on age limits, study fields and foreign language requirements, and provided fellows with a variety of pre-academic training opportunities to help ensure degree completion and overall success – particularly for those who studied in unfamiliar cultural and academic settings. By the end of the program, IFP Fellows had earned masters and doctoral degrees from over 600 universities in nearly 50 countries.
 
IFP developed a unique fellowship model that integrated gender, race, ethnicity, region, religion, economic and educational background, and physical disability into its recruitment and selection process. By working closely with partner organizations on the ground in twenty-two countries, we targeted students from marginalized groups and required that successful candidates demonstrate not only academic potential but also leadership capacity and social commitment. Candidates had to hold an undergraduate degree but also be activists or practitioners. They would be steeped in their local context and culture, yet eager to acquire new knowledge and perspectives. They would see the fellowship not only as an opportunity for personal gain, but also as a way to advance the public good. Above all, they would come from marginalized communities that by definition are far less likely to have access to advanced education than their more privileged counterparts. 
 
Thus the program’s goals were twofold: broaden access to and equity in higher education, and enhance fellows’ ability to contribute to social change. 
 
The Questions We Asked
 
Would we be able to recruit talented individuals from poor and discriminated communities?
 
Once target groups were identified, our International Partners (IPs) launched recruiting campaigns focused on geographical areas, organizations, or social and professional networks where these groups could be found. Recruitment often involved travel to remote regions. IPs developed innovative strategies such as advertising through vernacular language radio stations and newspapers, or using government district offices as distribution and pick-up points for applications. After 2004, returning alumni helped to recruit candidates from their home regions.
 
Applicants were assessed along the dimension of socio-economic disadvantage, and then scored for three other major selection criteria: academic achievement, social commitment and leadership potential. Short-listed candidates were interviewed, allowing personal trajectories to emerge and, with them, certain intangible details that underlined the value of “social merit” as a worthwhile consideration alongside merit defined in more conventional academic terms. 
 
Of our more than 4,300 Fellows, 79% are first-generation university students. 56% grew up in poverty, and 73% were raised in a family where parental income was below the national average. 57% have mothers who did not advance further than primary school. 68% come from rural areas or small cities and towns. Many diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities are represented among our cohorts, and not insignificantly, half of IFP Fellows are women. 
 
 
Would we find candidates who combined social commitment and leadership skills with academic achievement and potential?
 
The usual criterion for international scholarships—selecting the “best and brightest” on the basis of a candidate’s academic record—was insufficient, given our mission. Instead, the program looked for indicators of intellectual and personal achievement in other realms—independent publications, whether candidates had founded organizations, or if they had shown extraordinary motivation and success in overcoming social or economic obstacles to further their education. Leadership capacity and social commitment were as important as academic performance. 
 
The IFP fellows achieve academic results that show they can perform as well as their more privileged counterparts. Virtually all fellows were accepted to full-time master's, doctoral, or similar postgraduate programs in competitive universities in Britain, continental Europe, the United States, and other regions. Fully 97 percent of more than 4,100 alumni have successfully completed their fellowships, and 91 percent have earned advanced degrees. They also remain true to their social-justice commitment. The International Fellowships Program didn’t contribute to “brain drain.” On the contrary, the vast majority of the alumni have returned home, where they utilize their new knowledge for the betterment of the most vulnerable groups in their societies.
 
How would we help our Fellows gain admission and succeed in the high-quality degree programs that could actually deliver the kind of education they sought, enabling them to return home as more effective social justice leaders? 
 
Over time, we learned that there were many paths to academic success. Yet one constant was that the program would only work if our flexible policies were grounded in a “fellow-centered” ethos that engaged each Fellow in the process of defining his or her most appropriate course of study. These diverse individuals came from difficult and marginal backgrounds, and lacked the financial and social capital of more privileged members of their societies. IFP needed to shape the “enabling conditions” that would assist each Fellow to cross national and cultural boundaries and succeed in demanding and unfamiliar academic and social settings. 
 
Development of a range of “pre-academic training” approaches for Fellows who needed to study in a second or third language environment turned out to be one of the program’s most significant innovations, in addition to IFP’s flexible policy regarding study destination, which partially removed the critical “language bar” preventing many talented men and women all over the world from securing advanced study opportunities. Pre-enrollment training in areas such as research and computer skills and academic writing also prepared Fellows’ for rigorous graduate-level study programs. 
 
What kind of support system would best serve the needs of people from highly diverse countries and regions, speaking multiple languages and bringing widely divergent educational and social experiences to their graduate studies?
 
Locally-based partner organizations played a key role in managing the Fellows’ anxieties and expectations, accompanying them at every step of the fellowship cycle. As early as the recruitment stage, the local partners began to forge relationships with potential candidates. After selection, local advisors (often selection panel members) helped to assess the new fellows’ academic needs, develop a pre-academic training plan and guide each fellow through the placement process. Partner organizations then monitored fellows’ academic progress. 
 
Even beyond their formal role, partners’ insights into individual circumstances provided context and continuity when fellows experienced personal or academic problems, when family emergencies arose, and as fellows faced challenges of re-integration after finishing their studies. Universities where IFP fellows were clustered also provided them with ongoing support, and in the course of working with IFP developed new approaches for serving non-traditional students. 
 
How would we support alumni on their path to social justice leadership and professional development once the fellowship was over?
 
While IFP was largely focused on individual potential, life trajectories and personal achievement, we also knew that fellows could form a unique and powerful collective resource once they had finished their studies. IFP thus decided to help fund continued interaction among program alumni in all twenty-two countries. Ultimately, our substantial financial support for a diverse array of alumni social justice activities and events became one of the program’s distinguishing features. Most alumni are engaged in multiple activities, including further study, social and political activism, and public policy roles, and in case after case, they report that the IFP fellowship opened new and often unanticipated opportunities including employment, research grants, doctoral-level degrees and increased visibility for social justice initiatives.
 
Lessons Learned
 
Several critical lessons emerge from the IFP experience. First, as thousands of applications poured into IFP partner offices around the world, it became clear that the program could meet only a tiny fraction of the demand for fellowships. We received nearly 80,000 completed applications over the ten year selection cycle—and tens of thousands of additional inquiries and preliminary applications. 
 
Other international scholarship programs that seek to broaden their recruiting networks will find multitudes of qualified candidates.
 
Second, we now know that with proper support structures in place, talented individuals from marginalized communities can achieve academic success in a wide variety of higher education institutions. In working with the Fellows across the world, IFP found that academic preparation for overseas study is a relatively low-cost, up-front investment that yields consistently high returns. 
A third lesson is that both public and private universities can increase their proportion of non-traditional international students by adopting more flexible admissions policies, including conditional admissions. Universities can offer bridging programs and strong academic counseling that enable students to make timely transitions into their full-time academic programs as their skill levels improve. 
 
Fourth is the importance of working with local organizations to identify candidates who authentically represent marginalized or excluded groups. Even universities with limited recruiting budgets can draw on local expertise to help them reach international candidates other than the usual urban elites.
 
Finally, on the policy level, many donor countries provide individual scholarships as part of their foreign assistance programs. Yet donors often find it difficult to demonstrate a direct connection between scholarships and overall foreign assistance goals like poverty reduction. Targeting fellowships to talented leaders living and working with vulnerable communities and committed to solving their problems will help increase the chances that these beneficiaries will return home after their studies and help advance local development. 
 
The IFP Legacy
 
IFP’s influences extend beyond individual fellows. We see impacts on some partner universities, which transformed their admissions practices and designed new academic programs to serve students from socially excluded groups. The IFP model for pre-academic training is being utilized at the undergraduate as well as graduate level in various countries, again to prepare students from marginalized groups for success in highly competitive programs. A number of other scholarship programs around the world have consciously used IFP selection criteria to reach beyond the usual elites and ensure that students from marginalized groups do not enter their study programs at a disadvantage. 
 
Overall, IFP demonstrated that greater inclusiveness in higher education can be achieved without any loss of academic quality, and that higher education can—and should—be positively linked to social change.
 
This is the enduring value of the IFP legacy. 

 

 

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