Advising for the Future Awards Announced

In a meeting at the State Department, Grant Green, Under Secretary for Management, Patricia S. Harrison, Assistant Secretary for Educational and Cultural Affairs, and Kurt Landgraf, President and C.E.O of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), today discussed the 59 recipients of the “Awards for the Future” for Department of State-affiliated educational advising centers around the world.

The awards are being funded from a $750,000 donation made by ETS to support the international education efforts of the Department of State. The Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs is allocating the resources to make enhancement awards to its network of advising centers to modernize information and data systems, improve training and improve the ability of the centers to reach and attract students for study in the United States. The donation was made by ETS in appreciation of the Department’s services to international students. State’s advising center network provides information about U.S. college admission, language requirements and standardized testing.

Ranging between $2,000 and $50,000, the “Awards for the Future” will fund initiatives in forty-eight countries. Among the projects to be supported by the ETS donation are interactive websites in the West Bank/Gaza and Pakistan that will allow students to consult advisers on-line. In India, the leading source of foreign students in the U.S., a major grant to the U.S. Educational Foundation in New Delhi will fund expansion of advising centers in several sites, as well as new outreach programs to previously underserved areas of the country. A major grant to the center in Hong Kong will support an advising coordinator to assist the 47 locally staffed centers in other parts of China, the second leading source of foreign students to the U.S. higher education market. In Africa, an “Advising for the Future” award will underwrite the cost of video productions about accessing U.S. higher education from an African perspective.

Each year, the 500-plus Department of State-affiliated educational advising centers receive more than 25 million inquiries from prospective students and scholars about U.S. higher education. The number of foreign students in the U.S. continues to increase and now totals more than 580,000, adding roughly $12 billion annually to the U.S. economy, according to “Open Doors,” a study carried out for the Department of State through a grant to an American not for profit organization. The U.S. based Educational Testing Service is the world’s largest testing and measurement organization and a leader in education research.

For information regarding individual projects, please contact Philip Ives, Office of Global Educational Programs, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at (202) 619-7144.