Studying in the US: Four Kinds of Financial Aid

Posted by thanhlt

February 20, 2010

This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

This week in our Foreign Student Series, we look at financial
aid that comes in ships. Scholarships, fellowships and assistantships.

But first we talk about financial aid of another kind: grants.
A grant, unlike a loan, does not have to be repaid.

Memorial Stadium at Mizzou

One of our examples this week is the University of
Missouri-Columbia, known as Mizzou (pronounced mah-ZOO). Mizzou is a public university
with more than one thousand five hundred international students this school year.
The total student population is more than thirty thousand.

Mizzou has a grant program for international students.
The Curator’s Grant-in-Aid program is for those who get good grades and take
part in university activities. Graduate students who receive a grant get nine
free credits to take courses. Undergraduates receive between one thousand and
five thousand dollars in support.

Students must have attended Mizzou for a year before they
can receive a grant. And they must reapply for the awards each semester.

Some grants are called scholarships or fellowships. Scholarships
are for undergraduates; fellowships are for graduate students. Awards may be
based on financial need or on grades, talents or other requirements. The Global
Heritage Scholarship at Mizzou, for example, is only for international
undergraduates whose mother or father graduated from there.

The scholarship pays seven thousand five hundred dollars
a year for tuition. Full tuition is currently almost nineteen thousand dollars.

Tuition is about the same at another public university,
the University of Arizona in Tucson. It offers an undergraduate scholarship
for international students who earned high marks in high school. The program is
open to all foreign students who have been admitted to the university. Winners receive
between two thousand and ten thousand dollars a year to help pay tuition.

Seventy international students are currently receiving
the scholarship. The University
of Arizona has more than
two thousand international students this academic year. The school had close to
forty thousand students during the fall term.

Assistantships are jobs paid with money or free
classes. Graduate assistants help professors for about twenty hours a week.
They may teach undergraduates, grade papers and tests, and assist with
research.

And that’s the VOA Special English Education Report,
written by Nancy Steinbach. The earlier reports in our Foreign Student Series
are at voaspecialenglish.com. I’m Steve Ember.