THOMAS A. FARRELL
DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE
FOR ACADEMIC PROGRAMS

OPENING Remarks

Opening Plenary Session
South and Central Asia Fulbright Regional Workshop
Wednesday, December 10, 2008, 9:30 to 11:00 a.m.
The Taj Mahal Hotel, New Delhi, India

Good morning everyone. Sue, I appreciated that kind introduction.  

In light of the vicious acts of terrorism and tragic loss of life in Mumbai two weeks ago, the Fulbright Mission, through mutual understanding, -- "to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs" -- seems especially daunting.

Thank you for joining us here at this critical time in India for this first meeting of Fulbright representatives from Central Asia and South Asia Fulbright Commissions and U.S. Embassies and from our NGO partners at IIE and CIES.

Senator Fulbright said - the making of peace is a continuing process that must go on from day to day, from year to year...a daily task, a positive participation in all the details and decisions which together constitute a living and growing policy." Our meeting is integral to that critically important quotidian process.

So we are gathered here in India to share both our concerns and ideas and to ensure the continued excellence and relevance of these vital programs and activities.  

It is a pleasure to thank Adam Grotsky, Executive Director of the U.S. India Educational Foundation and his staff for all their hard work preparing to host us here this week. As mentioned last night at the Hailey Road reception, all of us are indebted to Fayaz Ahmad's scrupulous attention and diligence in implementing this program. 

All of us must acknowledge the deep debt of gratitude we owe to Larry Schwartz, Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, and his colleagues in the Public Affairs Section for their support of this workshop and the Fulbright Program with India overall.

At this seminal moment in the India-U.S. relationship, the people of the United States are most fortunate to be served by Larry. He has accomplished what for fifty years his diligent predecessors and others felt was impossible: a negotiated balanced, full partnership Agreement between India and the United States of America to contribute to and support the binational Fulbright Program.

Continuum of Exchanges

I want to use this moment and this address to step back to put the work we do on Fulbright into a larger and broader context of exchanges. We then can better get on with the important Fulbright issues we will discuss this week, the strength of our collaboration, successes and challenges in program management and other important regional issues.

Over the last seven years, the Department of State has been focused on the building of a continuum of programs abroad and at home that nurture youth and allow a wider group of participants, those from beyond the broad categories who have traditionally benefited, to participate in our educational exchanges.

Our commitment to mutual understanding and mutual respect are core values we have linked to education earlier in a young person's development. We no longer wait until later in high school or college to engage young people.

We are not simply reaching young people earlier; we are filling gaps in the pathway of mutual understanding and responsible engagement in the world. For so many years the Youth Exchange Program and our marvelous Fulbright Program have been the major stepping stones along our pathway. But for many young people the space before and between these anchor programs has been daunting to cross and, I am afraid to say, often unbridgeable even with an eager leap of faith.

So we are filling in the gaps with: programs emphasizing short term exposure to the U.S. or language learning overseas; new undergraduate initiatives that build confidence for talented student leaders outside the elite sections of society; programs that focus specifically on less affluent American college students; exchanges that recognize the value of building necessary employment skills; and foreign language and English programs that emphasize the tools students need to participate, communicate and compete in the global village.

Diverse and Younger Audiences
We have placed a high priority on reaching more diverse and younger audiences. In many parts of the world, our educational exchanges help to close what Queen Rania of Jordan has described as "the hope gap" among disaffected young people, by offering greater educational opportunities and a more positive future. 

We have worked hard to successfully reach a wider spectrum of students and at younger ages; intensified our outreach efforts to disadvantaged students; and offered new exchange opportunities that would be accessible and appealing to bright, motivated students from underserved sectors.

We recognize the importance of building skills among our future exchange candidates at earlier stages in their careers; and we recognize the enormous impact that selection for that very first scholarship award can have in increasing an individual's self image, her aspirations, and subsequent opportunities, in some cases for years to come.

As I mentioned, one of the roadmaps guiding us has been our approach to building the continuum or pathway of educational exchange opportunities for underserved sectors.

Overseas, this pathway provides the English ACCESS Microscholarship program for disadvantaged 14 to 18 year old students. There have been more than 44,000 students who have or are benefiting from the program in more than 55 countries around the world. Each Access program helps us build a pool of future candidates for exchanges at more advanced educational or professional levels--whether sponsored by the U.S. government or by other organizations.

English Access increases students' knowledge of English and U.S society and values, and improves their future job opportunities, as well as giving them the tools they need to compete for study and exchange programs in the future. A number of our Access students have already won scholarships to participate in State Department funded high school and undergraduate exchanges to the U.S., and we know that through Access we are building the Fulbright future by directing them to the Fulbright exchange opportunity.

At home, the National Security Language Initiative announced by the President at the Higher Education Summit Secretary Rice hosted in January 2006 invests in foreign language learning for our own young American citizens. I'll say more about that in a minute.  

Diversity and Access
Overseas, we have also created undergraduate student leader six-week summer institutes, and a program of semester and academic year study for undergraduates called UGRAD (or in South Asia known as NESA - 34 participants came from SCA). This marked the first time that the State Department had worked with foreign undergraduates in a global way in more than thirty years, and we are now serving more than 1,000.

The programs are designed to give students a substantive, initial exposure to the United States, on American campuses, with the knowledge that they would share their experience with their peers back home, and also be motivated to return here for graduate study in the future.

Our new Opportunity Grants initiative has awarded more than 800 small scholarships in over 75 countries to outstanding international students, identified by our Department-sponsored EducationUSA educational advisors overseas.

These are talented and deserving students, whom we believe have a good chance of winning a full scholarship from a U.S. college, but who can't afford the initial costs of test and application fees, travel to visa interviews and so on. The Opportunity Grants pay these costs for talented students without sufficient resources in whom we want to invest so students can realistically consider competing for admission to U.S. institutions.

Another of our recent projects is the Community College initiative which we designed to reach students who had some work experience and career goals in technical and vocational fields. These young people will become important opinion leaders in their communities. Currently there are 310 Community College participants representing constructive economic and social forces that our State Department exchanges have never before included. American Community Colleges are a unique element of U.S. higher education - their students represent about half of the U.S. undergraduate population - but these institutions are underutilized in sponsored international exchanges.

Teachers
We've also created new professional development programs for school teachers, who are vital to reaching young people in the mainstream and from underserved sectors of society in the U.S. and the more than 63 nations where teacher exchanges are active overseas.

Since 2001, we've more than tripled the number of exchange opportunities for teachers and administrators, who serve primary and secondary school students, to 860. Every year, these U.S. and international teachers take home new materials, updated methodology, improved language skills and authentic information about the U.S. and our partner countries to over 60,000 students overseas and 25,000 American school children in the USA.

And through the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant program, we are bringing more than 400 young teachers to the U.S. to assist in the teaching of their native languages on U.S. campuses and in high schools - while they improve their knowledge of English and U.S. society.

Reaching Americans

Building meaningful interaction with the public abroad is only one lane, of course, on a two way street. We have put considerable energy and money into expanding opportunities for Americans to more fully participate in exchanges, and to help build the skills they need to succeed in a global environment.

And we have been working to include more diverse and underserved sectors of American society in our exchange programs; we need to develop the talent of all our citizens and participants in our exchange programs, and showcase one of America's greatest strengths -- its diversity.

Since 2002 we have quintupled our funding in support of study abroad for U.S. undergraduate students through the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program. The Gilman program for American undergraduate students with limited finances is opening doors to study abroad to a much broader, more diverse audience of young people. Under the Gilman program, more than 3,000 students with high financial need have studied abroad in more than 100 countries since the program began seven years ago (Last year 31 studied in SCA).

This program is the most successful of any U.S. government study abroad effort in including minority students. The percentage of Gilman recipients who are African American is nearly four times the national participation rate of African Americans in study abroad, 15% of Gilman Scholars are African American whereas only 4% of eligible African Americans participate in college and university study abroad programs. For Latino students, it is double the national participation rate, and for Asian-American Gilman recipients, it is triple the national rate.  

And the Gilman program has been very successful in encouraging students to seek out non-traditional destinations, with more students studying in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East than in Western Europe.

National Security Language Initiative (NSLI)

Another of the important initiatives that we have introduced, and one that ECA takes particular pride, is the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI), which the President announced in January 2006.

Under NSLI, the Department of State is providing new opportunities to more than 1,000 American high school students, teachers, and undergraduate and graduate students in all 50 states to study critical languages abroad each year, and is strengthening foreign language teaching in hundreds of classrooms in the U.S. through exchanges and professional development.

The program that has been the most visible face of NSLI is the ECA - Academic unit's very successful intensive summer language institutes overseas, providing opportunities for more than 500 American undergraduate and graduate students each year to study Arabic, Chinese, Indic, Korean, Persian, Russian, and Turkic languages in more than a dozen countries overseas (84 studied this year in SCA).

You know we are also providing American Fulbrighters selected for Critical Language Enhancement Awards with 3-6 months of intensive language study before taking up their normal Fulbright grants. And I already mentioned the role of the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program, another critical part of NSLI (there are 28 FLTAs from SCA countries).

Together, the leadership, incentives, and new opportunities provided by the four NSLI federal partner agencies are creating a pathway of learning for American students and teachers contributing to the national effort to expand critical language learning and mastery. 

Fulbright

Which brings me to the State Department's flagship international academic exchange, the Fulbright program, now serving a historically high number of U.S. students: more than 1500 win Fulbright scholarships each year, as well as an historic high of foreign students - more than 2,800 new graduate level students come to the U.S. each year.  

We have accomplished this thanks to significant increases provided by Congress which has enabled us to boost the Fulbright number overall to more than 6,000 students, scholars, teachers, and researchers from the United States and more than 150 countries around the world.   

One priority for me under the Fulbright program has been expanding the U.S. Fulbright Student English Teaching Assistant Program. Through this program we are able to send 450 new American college graduates to work with students in high schools overseas, including schools with diverse and multi-cultural populations. In many ways the Fulbright ETA program which has been a small but integral part of the exchange for over 50 years comes closest to the Fulbright mission of building mutual understanding as these participants share their language and culture and learn from young people overseas a deeper appreciation of thee host society. 

The Fulbright ETA program is a great opportunity for American students who want a broad professional and service-oriented exchange experience. The Fulbright Commission in Nepal is initiating the first Fulbright ETA Program in SCA; India and Sri Lanka are also interested in awarding Fulbright ETAs this year.

We have also looked for creative ways to engage other talented students in our exchanges. One small but very successful new initiative is the establishment of the Fulbright-MTV university awards for American students in music-related fields. These Fulbright students are creating reports on their overseas exchanges for broadcast on the MTV university network on U.S. campuses. They are helping to raise awareness of Fulbright opportunities and widen the impact of what we do among a broad audience of American students.

In 2007, ECA initiated the International Fulbright Science and Technology Award for Outstanding Foreign Students targeting emerging leaders by offering the most prestigious international scholarships available in science and technology for doctoral study in science, technology, or engineering. South Asia has done extremely well in the first three years of the program by capturing 15 awards in three years -- two awards in 2007, six awards in 2008, and seven awards in 2009 out of approximately 40 awards worldwide each year.

Bangladesh is to be particularly congratulated -- receiving a total of five awards -- two in both 2007 and 2008 -- only a handful of countries receive more than one award each year for this prestigious worldwide program.

Success in South & Central Asia
I want to highlight a few recent Fulbright successes in your region.

In Afghanistan we know that our colleagues cope with tough challenges managing the Fulbright Foreign Student Program in the areas of testing, documentation, and counseling grantees. Our very active collaboration has resulted in applicants who are better prepared for success. Afghan Fulbright students now have higher English language ability as a result of pre-testing and benefit from a pre-departure orientation initiated last spring.   

In India, our extraordinary collaboration resulted in the signing of a new educational agreement last July 4th by the U.S. Ambassador and the Indian Foreign Secretary in which the Indian government agreed to contribute parity of funding for the first time after over fifty years of conducting academic exchanges between our two countries.

The new agreement also called for the establishment of a U.S.-India Higher Education Council to act as a clearing house for the development of higher education institutional relations between the U.S. and India. We are committed to having Fulbright make a unique and strategic contribution to the U.S. - India relationship and to higher education in both countries. We also appreciated and supported the U.S. Embassy's huge efforts over the last two years to push for a functioning and efficient research clearance process for American Fulbrighters which has been moderately successful.

The Pakistan Fulbright Commission is the largest recipient of U.S. government funds for the Fulbright Program and an example of collaboration amongst several funding entities - the U.S. Agency for International Development, Pakistan's Higher Education Commission, and ECA. To invest in Pakistan's future leadership, developing Pakistan's higher education sector, and supporting the long-term, broad-based partnership between the United States and Pakistan are mutually beneficial goals.

In Central Asia, we have been working collaboratively this past year with Public Affairs Sections at the U.S. Embassies to move towards regularizing the Fulbright Program by establishing a Fulbright Foreign Student Program. This initiative supports the Fulbright goals of developing future leaders in a range of disciplines with ties to, and an understanding of, the United States. As a result, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan will now have all four elements of the core Fulbright Program beginning in 2009 -- U.S. and foreign, students and scholars.

We have developed an ambitious roadmap as we build the Fulbright future in Central and South Asia. The road is long and smoothing the path, as I quoted Senator Fulbright in my opening, is "continuing the process from day to day."

During this week all of us can contribute to improving prospects for improved mutual understanding. Thanks for your attention and now we have an opportunity for discussion and questions.